The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project

"In the decade from 1984 to 1994, scientists at Argonne National
Laboratory developed an advanced technology that promised safe nuclear
power unlimited by fuel supplies, with a waste product sharply reduced
both in radioactive lifetime and amount. The program, called the IFR,
was cancelled suddenly in 1994, before the technology could be perfected
in every detail. Its story is not widely known, nor are its implications
widely appreciated. It is a story well worth telling, and this series of
articles does precisely that."
--- excerpt from
Plentiful
Energy and the IFR story by Charles Till

"Other countries are developing nuclear power. They haven't said
'Well, the US has stopped it, we're going to stop it.' We are inevitably
shifting what was a real technological lead overseas. And we will wind
up then, sometime in the future, when we need to have that option,
negotiating with some other country to bring it back."
--- Alan Schriesheim, Director, Argonne National Laboratory,
1984 to 1996

"I think what is actually happening is that the United States is
being swiftly passed by China. Within 20 years, I think China will be
selling nuclear reactors all over the world, and supplying the operating
staff for those reactors, and selling the fuel for those reactors. They
will be a super-power in every way. Sadly, distracted by terrorism and
the fossil fuel lobby (oil, gas, and coal), we are letting it happen,
even though we have the innovative capacity and national productivity to
leap-frog China. Representative democracy with special interest
lobbying is not necessarily the most competitive institution. It seems
possible to me that top-down decision making can sometimes make better
decisions than an ignorant crowd manipulated by entrenched interests."
-- Chris Uhlik, Engineering Director, Google

"The country which first develops a breeder reactor will have a great
competitive advantage in atomic energy."
-- Enrico Fermi, Los Alamos, 1945

Why do we need the IFR now?

In order to re-start nuclear power, it is best if we have a solution that
overcomes as many public objections as possible: safety, waste, cost, and
proliferation. The IFR is a vast improvement in all of these areas.

Specifically, we should pursue the (U.S.-developed) IFR
because

(a) it operates symbiotically very nicely at the back
end of the thermal-reactor fuel cycle,

(b) it solves the "waste problem" by removing the need
to isolate the waste for more than 300 years,

(c) it utilizes a very large fraction instead of a
minuscule fraction of natural uranium (factor of more than 100),

(d) it permanently eliminates the need to enrich
uranium,

(e) it permanently eliminates the need for land-based
mining of

uranium: sea water becomes a perpetual and very
economical source of uranium (but it won't be needed for centuries because of
the uranium we have already accumulated).

(f) it leads eventually to the secure sequestration of
virtually all of the world's plutonium, and

(g) if the U.S. does not resume the technological and
geopolitical lead in this area, the global development of nuclear technology
will continue to spread anarchistically, every nation for itself.

Key features
of the IFR include:

Inherently safe: it is safer than LWR reactors because it passively shuts itself down if
something goes wrong: no computers or valves are involved. This was proven
in tests where the coolant flow was shut off and the reactor shut itself
down without operator intervention or the intervention of any active or
passive safety devices. The basic design and safety performance was reviewed
by the NRC. In January 1994, the NRC issued a pre-application safety
evaluation report which concluded that no objections or impediments to
licensing the IFR design have been identified.

Produces no long-lived waste: It produces virtually zero long-lived nuclear waste.
All of the long-lived waste is recycled in the reactor and used for fuel.
Only the short-lived radioactive waste remains and that is only dangerous
for a few hundred years and we know how to solve that problem.

Uses existing nuclear waste for fuel: It uses existing waste (from bombs and nuclear reactors) as fuel so it
solves the "what do we do with all that nuclear waste" problem.
All of that waste is burned to produce energy. No long-lived waste remains.

Fast nuclear is an inexhaustible energy resource: Unlike with LWRs, with fast reactors you will
never run out of cheap fuel. Fast reactors are over 100 times more fuel
efficient than today's light water reactors. Enough to power our planet for
billions of years.

Proliferation resistant: The IFR recycling process cannot separate out pure Plutonium so it does
not
create an easier path for a terrorist to make a bomb. It creates a path
where it is almost impossible to make a bomb. If we choose not to promote
this technology, the world will standardize on a much more dangerous
recycling process where is it is much easier to make a bomb. By switching to
fast reactors, we eliminate the need for enrichment which is the big
proliferation risk today.

Low cost: It is potentially less expensive than today's nuclear reactors (assuming
you can get down the manufacturing cost curve) because most of the key
pieces are built in factories and shipped to the site rather than built
on-site.

High reliability: Our own EBR-II ran for 30 years with incident
before being shut down for political reasons in 1994. The Russian
fast reactor (BN-600) which has been producing electricity commercially for
more than 30 years has been among their most reliable reactors in their
fleet. The Chinese recently ordered two fast reactors from the Russians.

The NRC has pre-approved the design: In January 1994, the NRC
issued a pre-application safety evaluation report which concluded that no
objections or impediments to licensing the IFR design have been identified.

Objective analysis confirms it is the world's best Gen IV reactor
design: Although there are other reactor designs such as the LFTR that
might appear to be promising, the IFR was rated #1 in a multi-year
comparative study done by the Gen IV International Forum. It has the support
of Hans Bethe, over 1,500 scientists from ANL, support from the scientists
who have the most hands-on experience with fast reactors, support from
former top nuclear management at DOE, and so on. GE has a commercial design
that has been pre-certified; they are ready to submit to NRC certification
and build. We have three decades of operational experience with it and most
of the hard problems have been solved. If you only have money to build one
fast reactor, this is clearly your best choice. Nothing else is even close.

Support from the National Academy of Sciences: The National Resource Council
committee sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that
liquid metal fast reactors (such as the IFR) should have highest priority
for long-term nuclear technology development..

We've already committed to work with France and Japan on the
development of prototype/demonstration Sodium Cooled Fast Reactors (which
includes the IFR). We just signed a
Joint Statement of Trilateral Cooperation on the IFR technology on
October 4, 2010. The other countries will build it; the US will continue
research for 30 years and build nothing, giving those other countries a 30
year head-start on technology we invented.

These are a few of the reasons why other countries (like Russia,
France, Japan, China, and India) are constructing new fast reactors today.

The
current US Department of Energy plan is to continue to dismantle our only
remaining fast reactor and
to study this technology for at least 30 years before deciding whether to build
one again. This gives other countries at least a 30 year head start on us.

How do we become leaders in advanced nuclear by allowing other nations to
have a 30 year head start? I don't know because nobody I've talked to has a
straight answer to that question.

Why is nuclear energy attractive?

Nuclear is the cleanest source of energy with smallest
environmental disruption. If affects the least amount of land while
generating tiny quantities of waste which are tightly controlled.

Nuclear is the safest source of energy killing the
fewest people per GW-hr of any source in history.

Nuclear is among the cheapest sources of energy with
large plants like Palo Verde in Arizona being hugely profitable.

Nuclear can be quickly scaled to meet the clean energy needs of the
entire nation;
renewables cannot: Most of our 100 nuclear plants were all started
within a 3 year window. Today, nuclear supplies 70% of our clean power. We
haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years, but renewables are still
rounding error in terms of contribution to our power. Hydro (which is not
scalable) is 66% of the renewable contribution. Even with a 30 year head
start, nuclear today supplies 15 times more power than wind and solar
combined!

Nuclear power works reliably 24x7: it is independent of
the weather and the time of day. Capacity factors are near 100%.

With fast nuclear, we don't need any more uranium
mining and we can use existing waste as fuel so environmental damage is
minimized

A nuclear power plant design invented at Argonne National Lab 24 years
ago has none of the drawbacks of conventional nuclear plants

To control climate
change, we must get rid of virtually all carbon emissions from coal. To do that, we need a way to generate
power for a cost less than coal, that can generate power reliably 24x7, and that can be constructed
virtually anywhere. Solar and wind don't meet the need; that is why even
environmentally progressive countries such as Germany are still building
coal plants. But we have a technology that can displace coal, but it is not
well known. It was a billion dollar government research project...over
10 years at our top government national laboratory for energy (Argonne
National Laboratory)...the
largest energy research project in our history. Our government had finally done
something truly visionary and great! But the project was quashed by
President Clinton in 1994 because Clinton said it was unneeded and the scientists who worked on it were ordered to
remain silent. One of our
country's leading experts on global warming, Jim Hansen, recently
re-discovered the IFR. Those who have been briefed on
the IFR believe it is an essential technology we must develop to combat climate change and should be restarted immediately.
This led to Hansen including restarting 4th generation nuclear power as one
of his 5 top priorities for President Obama (see the bottom of page 7 in
Hansen's Tell Barack Obama the Truth -- The Whole Truth).

The DOE
tried to restart it under GNEP, but Congress has zeroed the funding for
GNEP (not for reasons relating to the IFR which nobody in Congress knows
anything
about). Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

California Lt.
Governor John Garamendi flew in the top IFR scientists and convened a
meeting of experts in the field including one Nobel prize winner (Burton
Richter, former Director of SLAC). Garamendi
came away impressed and convinced that this is something we must do and is
working to take the next steps in California.

Until now, I have been pretty agnostic about nuclear power. In fact, in May
2006, I wrote an op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News on why we shouldn't
pursue nuclear power as a solution for global warming which
infuriated the pro-nuclear people.

After reading Hansen's newsletter (where I first learned about the IFR) and
doing months of research on the IFR listening to arguments on both sides, I've
changed my opinion. And some really smart friends
of mine have read the stuff below, done their research, and their minds have changed as well.
In fact, I don't know anyone with an open mind who has met with the scientists who worked on the
project who hasn't come away impressed. Even the harshest critics of the IFR
admit that that they might be wrong.

I first heard about the IFR on August 4, 2008, in
an
email I received from James Hansen who is one of our nation's top climate experts. The
email summarized his recent trip overseas to meet with foreign leaders.

The two most important things that Hansen tells foreign heads of state are (from page
5):

Annual CO2 emissions, and thus percent reduction of annual emissions, is
not an appropriate metric for controlling climate change. Instead, we must
limit the total fossil fuel CO2 emission.

Phase-out of coal emissions is the sine qua non for climate
stabilization.

In other words, if we don't get rid of coal plants all over the planet, we're completely hosed.
The sooner we do that, the better. Getting rid of every single coal plant is the
single most important thing we can do to slow down global warming. If we cannot
do that, then nothing else matters. We are basically re-arranging deck chairs on
the Titanic. We will go down with the ship.

Displacing coal plants is hard because they are really cheap (since the
utilities are not assessed of their pollution), they can be built anywhere where
water is available (all thermal power plants, fossil or nuclear, have to be able
to get rid of excess heat), and
because they provide power 24x7. That's why
every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China
that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

Getting rid of them is hard. Even with all the awareness about the harm of
coal plants to the environment in the US, we have been unsuccessful in
displacing them. Today, we still get
49% of our
electric power from coal plants. If we can't displace coal plants in the US,
how can we expect other countries, like China, to displace their coal plants?

Fundamentally, to get rid of coal plants and have any hope at all on
controlling climate change, you must to come up with a power plant capable of
24x7 operation that can be built anywhere that is just as cheap (or cheaper) to build and
operate as a coal plant. If you had that, then you'd have an economic incentive
for people to make the environmentally responsible choice. There would be no
reason to build coal plants anymore.

So if the US developed a way to generate electric power that had no CO2
emissions, was as cheap as coal, and provided 24x7 power, and could be built
anywhere, and didn't require a lot of land to build, and was very safe, and
didn't increase the risk from terrorism then that would be a great thing. It
would mean that China would have an economic incentive to build these plants
rather than coal plants.

We don't have that now. Concentrated solar plants can only be economically
built in certain locations. Same for wind power. And both are intermittent
sources (although if you have enough wind power over enough area in the right
corridor, it can be pretty reliable).

Such an invention would, quite literally, save the planet from destruction.
It would be the "holy grail" in the fight against global warming. It would
arguably be the most important invention in history.

So you'd think that if such an invention existed, everyone would know about
it, wouldn't you?

Well, would you believe that our top energy scientists invented a technology
that does all those things and more! These plants can also get rid of the waste
from existing nuclear power plants! And unlike nuclear plants where there is
only a finite amount of nuclear material available (I think about 100 years),
these plants make their own fuel so they will last 100,000 years. Remember
Einstein's famous E=mc2? The point is that if you do it right, a
little bit of matter can make a lot of energy.

And would you believe the research was done more than 20 years ago in 1984 by
a large group of US scientists at Argonne National
Laboratory?

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fourth generation nuclear design that
provides a clean, inexhaustible source of power, cheap, with virtually no waste,
inherently safe (if you remove the cooling, it shuts down rather than melts down),
and the added benefit that it consumes the nuclear waste from other nuclear
plants that we can’t figure out how to get rid of.

Advantages include:

It can be fueled entirely with material recovered from
today's used nuclear fuel.

It consumes virtually all the long-lived radioactive
isotopes that worry people who are concerned about the "nuclear waste
problem," reducing the needed isolation time to less than 500 years.

It could provide all the energy needed for centuries
(perhaps as many as 50,000 years),
feeding only on the uranium that has already been mined

It uses uranium resources with 100 to 300 times the efficiency
of today's reactors.

It does not require enrichment of uranium.

It has less proliferation potential than the reprocessing
method now used in several countries.

It's 24x7 baseline power

It can be built anywhere there is water

The power is very inexpensive (some estimates are as low as 2 cents/kWh
to produce)

Safe from melt down because if something goes wrong, the reactor
naturally shuts down rather than blows up

And, of course, it emits no greenhouse gases.

What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing...that is if you look at the facts
and the science rather than the words.

Sadly, most people when they hear "nuclear reactor" or "breeder reactor"
react negatively. "Not in my backyard," they say. But that's because of second
generation nuclear technology. When people say "no nuclear," they really are
referring to "second generation nuclear." Everything about the IFR and fourth
generation technology is completely different. The words with negative
connotations are no longer negative. Yet we have this bad habit of remembering
the bad associations. We have to overcome that. For example, one scientist told
me, "Breeding, however, is a dirty word these days, so the GNEP
emphasis is on burning the transuranics, instead of using them to assure
an expanding source of clean energy into the indefinite future." So, in other
words, we are doing stupid things because "breeding" is a dirty word. "Breeding"
for the IFR is the nuclear equivalent of "recycling and re-using." That's a good
thing, not a bad thing. And the safe word, "burning," is actually a bad thing.
So the connotations are actually reversed.

We actually gave a group of our smartest scientists funding for 10 years and
left them alone to come up with something brilliant so that it could be
completed before we actually needed to deploy it. Talk about visionary,
long-term thinking! Of course today things are different. Today, Congress is
completely shortsighted. After gas is at $4/gallon, they say we need to drill
for more oil. Well if that is the solution, how come we didn't do that 10 years
ago so we wouldn't have a crisis?

So here, in a rare instance of long term strategic investment and vision, our
government did something really amazing in funding this project. And the
scientists returned that trust by delivering on their promises. And then our
government thanks them by pulling the plug on the project just before it was
completed.

When Bill Clinton cancelled the funding in 1994, he said in his State of the
Union speech that he did it because the project was unnecessary, not because it
didn't meet any of its objectives. In his speech, he said, "We will terminate
unnecessary programs in advanced reactor development."

He never asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into whether this
project was unnecessary. Why not? Shouldn't you do a little objective research
before you pull the plug on the biggest energy research project in history?

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) technology is arguably the single most
important thing we can do to stop global warming. If it isn't the single
most important thing, it's awfully close to the top.

So if this is so great,
how come everyone isn't all over this technology?

Because nobody knew about it!

How can that be?

Because the DOE ordered the scientists working on the project not to talk
about it.

Why would the government do that?

Why do you think the government would pour billions of dollars into the
biggest energy research project in history and then not just cancel it, but do
their best to bury it? The researchers at Argonne developed a safe and
economical source of unlimited clean energy. Between that and the other
renewable power technologies we wouldn't need oil, coal, gas or uranium
mining/drilling anymore. We're talking about putting the most powerful
corporations on the planet out of business. Not out of malice or spite, but
simply because they won't be needed anymore and because what they're doing to
the planet is killing us.

Some people think that the fossil fuel lobbyists could tell you why our government
ordered the scientists not to talk about it. It's similar to the gag
order (and edits to manuscripts and reports including IPCC reports) that the administration likes
to put on scientists who try to talk about global warming. Jim Hansen can
tell you a few stories about that since he's experienced it first hand.

In fact, Hansen himself just found out about the IFR recently. Hansen is
very informed. So if he didn't know about it, it's probably not well known. And that's what I found when I asked around.

According to
this article that just appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
Bill Gates is investing in a project at Intellectual Ventures to
"create a new type of nuclear reactor that would use fuels other than
enriched uranium -- including spent fuel from existing reactors." The
article quoted Myhrvold as saying " The idea is to create a nuclear reactor
that is simpler and cheaper than current reactors, and generates clean power
without waste or proliferation problems."

Well that's exactly what the IFR did. They knew about the IFR. It
would be great if he could help it succeed or has ideas on how to make it
even better.

GE has created a commercial plant design called the S-PRISM. GE is ready and
willing to build a plant (a) to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a
commercial-scale operation, and (b) to narrow the existing uncertainty in the
final cost. They are not proposing, yet, to plunge into mass production of S-PRISMs. We can start
building a reactor vessel for around
$50 million.

"I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret and reverse
this shortsighted decision. But complete or not, the concept and the
work done to prove it remain genius and a great contribution to the
world."

"Through his work on the Integral Fast Reactor program, Dr. Till
demonstrated that his technical solutions out paced the ability of the
political process to appreciate them."

I couldn't have said that better. And Senator Kempthorne, who also isn't
exactly known for his advocacy of science, is still waiting for his colleagues
in Congress to regret and reverse their decision.

The good news is that
DOE is trying to restart IFR with the GNEP (Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership) initiative. The GNEP,
if it is allowed to proceed, will involve a commercial demonstration that
will establish the degree of economic competitiveness of the recycling
process. General Electric thinks they can build an economically viable
system and they already have a complete commercial design completed
(S-PRISM).

Once again Congress shows how easily they seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The same
Congress that brought you the Iraq war is now making sure that the best
solution to the global warming never sees the light of day.

Hansen was
blunt in his most recent trip report when he wrote “we should not have
bailed out of research on fast reactors.” Yet here we are doing it again.
When are our politicians going to start listening to our scientists who are
trying to solve the global warming problem?

Are there any other promising technologies that have no emissions and the
potential to displace coal plants and can be sited anywhere? I don't know of
any other than this.

But we should be looking at the ideas that are on the table now and
funding the most promising 5 ideas with stable long-term funding (e.g., 10
years or more) that isn't subject to the capriciousness of Congress. That
way, we'll have solutions available when we desperately need them instead of
the normal short sighted approach we take which is to react to a crisis
rather than take preventative steps. An energy crisis should never have
occurred in the US. We should have been making huge investments in renewable
research 10 to 20
years ago.

In this case we got lucky and did make the investment in electric power
generation and the technology is available
today when we need it. What a miracle.

Now we need another miracle: we need our government to restart the
research at Argonne, we need the NRC to accelerate the approval of the plant
designs, and we need to allow utilities to start building these plants. GE
is ready and willing to build a demonstration plant.

California has a ban on new nuclear plants until the waste problem is
solved. But building the IFR solves the waste problem. So I hope California
will be a leader in incentivizing our utilities to start building these
plants here. If California needs to change the law to do that, it should.

For around $50M, we can build a reactor vessel to expedite certification and
licensing by the NRC. That's a small price to pay to prove we have a silver bullet to solve the global warming
problem. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.

From a risk management point of view, you certainly want to cultivate and
develop at least a small portfolio of silver bullets, i.e., "silver
buckshot." After spending a lot of time talking to the people who built this
technology, it's clear to me that the IFR deserves a place in that
portfolio. The research at Argonne should be restarted now and someone
should ask GE to build one; either a big utility or Congress should give DOE
the money so they can have GE build a pilot S-PRISM test plant.

We are
running out of time. If we do not start using breeder reactors, such as the
IFR, this century, then it appears we will reach "peak nuclear" this
century. If we use 4th generation breeder reactors such as the IFR (whose
only disadvantage seems to be perception), we can extend the usable life of our
nuclear resources to 1,000 years or more (see
GamePlan, p. 126)
with the IFR folks estimating over 50,000 years.

Also, it's not something
we can decide to do later. If our objective is to get to 20% nuclear in our
energy mix, that means we must build one 3GW plant per week for the next 25
years (see GamePlan, p.
149)!

So unless we are absolutely 100% sure we don't need nuclear, we should
start very soon, or that option will be lost forever.

Mary Nichols, chair of California's Air Resources Board has been convinced
for years, and has said publicly, that nuclear would be needed and would make a
comeback but only with breeder technology. While she has not yet been briefed in
the IFR, she wants to learn more about it and a meeting has been set up.

A
number of people who have read the above had additional insightful questions,
such as "how do you respond to the disadvantages listed on the wikipedia page on
the IFR?" or "if this is so good, why doesn't GE have a customer for the
S-PRISM?" or "how do you address the proliferation problem?" Those questions,
and more, are answered here: The Integral
Fast Reactor (IFR) project: Q&A.

Here are some more interesting facts:

Nuclear provides 70% of the carbon free
electric power in the US even though we haven't started building a new nuclear
plant in 30 years!

With the used fuel plus depleted uranium that's on hand,
we can power the world for centuries before having to mine new uranium. With
fast reactors and eventual mining, uranium is inexhaustible

There's much more energy in the depleted uranium on
hand than there is in the coal still in the ground.

Your typical coal plant emits well over 100 times more radioactive
materials than a nuclear plant! See p. 89 of Blees' book for figures that
will astound you.

Some 24,000 people die prematurely in the US from the effects of soot
from coal plants (see p. 99). Annual health care costs due to soot, per
year: $167 billion dollars (see p. 100)!

Even if you add the 56 deaths from Chernobyl, far more people have been
injured or killed from hydropower, oil, and gas (see p.99 of Blees' book).

With the investment of (nuclear) energy, carbon can be extracted from
CO2 and hydrogen from water, to make synthetic liquid fuel. No coal involved
-- unless the CO2 comes from existing coal-fired plants. Simplest, perhaps,
is to make methanol (CH3OH): 2CO2 + 4H2O + energy -> 2CH3OH + 3O2. It
is truly carbon-neutral, since the CO2 emitted when the fuel is burned is
only equal to what was used in the first place. This would make use of the
existing distribution infrastructure while a better system (batteries or
boron, perhaps) evolves. While this has been known for several years, very
few people seem to know about it. See

We read about coal plant discharges all the time. The last time we heard
about a nuclear discharge in the US was TMI. For example,

On December 22, one billion gallons of coal ash sludge
and contaminated water, the waste product of coal-fired power plants of the
Tennessee Valley Authority, broke through a containment area into the rivers
of Kingston, Tennessee.

Last week a coal train operated by National Coal Corporation over turned
spilling approximately 1100 tons of coal next to the New
River in Scott County, Tennessee. Eight rail cars, which typically hold 120
tons of coal, were involved.

And now another spill occurred in Alabama at the Tennessee Valley
Authority Widows Creek coal-fired plant, releasing up to 10,000
gallons of polluted sludge.

Nuclear operates without government subsidies

Toshiba is building a micro reactor that is 100 times
smaller than a typical nuclear plant, at 6 feet by 20 feet. It produces 200
kilowatts of energy at about 5 cents per kilowatt hour — cheaper than
coal-fired power in most places in the U.S. The Japanese company will begin
marketing the reactors in the United States and Europe in 2009.

There is a LOT of misinformation that is unfortunately being spread by
seemingly credible sources. For example, here are some items to consider in
response to an article that recently appeared in Scientific American:

-- The plutonium at WIPP is only "deadly" after a few thousand years if
you go down there and live in close contact with it with it -- and maybe not
even then.

The problems with fast reactors have been
non-fundamental. Examples:
-- The Monju reactor was undamaged by the fire, and has been kept shut down
for political reasons. I think it has been given the go-ahead to start up.
-- The EBR-II fast reactor worked flawlessly for many years.
-- The Phenix fast reactor in France has been on-line for decades.
-- The Superphenix reactor was shut down for political reasons, after it
finally had its problems behind it and was working well.
-- The Russian BN-600 has been working well for decades
-- As you well know, the IFR technology has not yet been implemented. so
Lyman's claim that "it never worked" is nonsense.
-- The fast-reactor waste would consist of 1 ton of fission products per
GWe-year. True, "thousands of tons" if there were thousands of reactors.
Easily dealt with -- harmless in less than 500 years (unlike coal waste).

And this comment from one of my blogs:

As Mr. Kirsch pointed out, statements that nuclear is in any way dirty or
dangerous are utterly Orwellian. Completely at odds with known fact.

Here are some references (links) to clear up some other misconceptions
repeated by Ms. Corbett:

Nuclear’s total overall net CO2 emissions are very small, ~2% of coal’s,
~5% of natural gas, and similar to (or lower than) renewables:

Also, many analyses show that renewable sources like wind and solar
require over 10 times as much steel and concrete, per kW-hr generated, than
nuclear does. Their oil/gas inputs are probably greater as well.

In terms of both CO2 emissions, and oil inputs, however, the real point
is that these issues are essentially negligible, for both nuclear and
renewables, compared to using fossil fuels themselves.

Even Arjun Makhijani, who claims you can do it with just renewables, admits
that today's technologies are not sufficient to solve our carbon-free energy
needs!

The vast majority of renewable experts concede that nuclear must be part of
the energy mix going forward. But there are still some environmentalists who
claim you can do it without nuclear. Arjun Makhijani is one of the most
prominent of these environmentalists having written a book "Carbon-Free and
Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy" about it.

But
Arjun Makhijani and Nuclear Absolutism points out that at the 2008 debate
with Patrick Moore, Makhijani acknowledged that removing fossil fuels and
nuclear energy from the mix of energy generators would introduce baseload
generation issues, but touted the human imagination as a source for solutions.

So sure, you can do it without nuclear, as long as you rely on us inventing a
suitable replacement in time to save the planet. That seems risky to me when you
have a perfectly good alternative that you know how to do.

Comments on the IFR from one of Australia's top climatologists

It's not just noted climatologist Jim Hansen and noted British environmental
author
Mark Lynas who
think that IFRs are critical to solving the climate
crisis. Below are some comments I received from
Barry Brook, of Australia's top
climatologists.

This list of posts also include what will eventually be a 6-part review
series of the book by Tom Blees, Prescription
for the Planet, which, within its 400 pages,
describes IFR and some related technologies (boron-powered vehicles
and plasma burners for waste recycling) that together
circumscribe the most practical and innovate energy and sustainability
solution I have yet encountered. It also looks carefully at how
to achieve the energy revolution required on an international scale. It is, in my opinion, the most important book ever
written on energy and climate solutions.

The other thing the critics lack is a viable alternative, but they really
never focus on this. They'll talk about terrorism or proliferation risks or all
the reasons why the IFR isn't a perfect solution. That's not the point. The
point about climate change is we have to displace coal at a minimum. If not the
IFR, then what? The critics never talk about that.

I wrote to Brook:

this is so infuriating since IFRs are FAR FAR better than existing
nuclear plants and existing nuclear plants have an INCREDIBLE safety
record....far safer than any other power source. Obama's new Secretary
of Energy Steve Chu points out that existing nuke plants
produce 70% of the GHG-free power in America....it is even more amazing when
you consider the fact that we haven't started
building a new nuclear plant for 30 years!

He wrote back (emphasis mine):

It is infuriating,
I agree, because environmental groups seem to be willing to
sacrifice great opportunities to fix fundamental problems,
completely, because of historical (and even then, mostly ill
founded) biases, ideologies and misinformation. My primary goal is
about fixing the climate change problem. I was utterly depressed
when I worked through the numbers on renewables and found they
didn’t stack up. But did I push that aside and pretend it was the
solution anyway? No way! I got angry and felt without hope (until I
found out about IFR). But I didn’t lie to myself or others in the
interim (I just implied there was little hope, when pushed…). That
form of disingenuous debating is what must be stamped out here, and
that is why rebuttals of ‘propaganda’ pieces like that from FoE (the
most strident anties in Australia who helped kill discussion on the
Gen III issue here a few years back) MUST be pursued.

Even Gen III+ like
the ESBWR are incredibly safe. IFRs just do it even better (good old
physical laws). Anyway, I’ll get off my podium now.

Then I wrote:

In the FOE piece, they wrote:

Also ignoring the fact that 70-80+% of greenhouse emissions arise
from sectors other than electricity generation - so Kirsch's claim
that IFR's could be the "holy grail in the fight against global
warming" is stupid.

More importantly, that pew page also says: 68 percent of India’s CO2
emissions are from coal

Yikes. The point is that if you can't get rid of coal, we're screwed.

To which he replied:

What he wrote is at
best grossly disingenuous. You need to solve the electricity carbon
problem to fix the vehicular fuels problem, space heating and embedded
energy in building and manufactured goods, and Tom has a solution for
MSW [municipal solid waste] also. About half of agricultural emissions
can also be solved if you have a zero-carbon energy source. Then you
just need to worry about the ruminant methane and carbon from
deforestation. But the bottom line is, if you fix electricity, every
else will fall into place.

I also pointed out to him that
when I ask the IFR critics in the US for their plan for how they propose to
stop China and India from using coal, they don't have an answer and admit
nuclear is the way to go. He asked the same question of the critics in
Australia. Here's what he wrote:

I had a similar set of arguments with an anti-nuclear campaigner for
the Australian Conservation Foundation recently – he started
hammering me about proliferation risks, and so I asked him what his
plan was for replacing the 484 GW of coal-fired power stations
already installed in China, and the further 200 or so plants in the
planning or construction pipeline. Like your critic, he had no
answer.

Similarly a strong collection of climate action groups recently
protested at the Australian Parliament House and came up with a
manifesto on actions required to produce a zero-carbon Australia.
But one of their ‘non negotiables’ was a ban on all nuclear power.
So I pointed out to them that they’re obviously not 100% committed
to solving the climate problem fully after all [this was their ambit
claim] – at least if it conflicts with other entrenched ideologies
[as an alternative example, I’m not a vegetarian, but for scientific
reasons I will no longer choose to eat beef or sheep if I have the
option because of the climate-forcing effect of ruminant methane].
No answer.

There is a critique of IFR here: I plan to post a response on my
blog, since the author Jim Green linked to it from a comment. Let me
know if you have anything specific to say in response to it and I’ll
add it to the rejoinder I’m about to write [with acknowledgement).

Anyway, please do keep me in the loop – I’ve vitally interested in
pushing this forward and am getting traction. My full list of
articles on IFR is here:

Comments on Mark Lynas's website in debate between Greenpeace and Blees

Mark Lynas read Blees book, checked out the facts, and found out conventional
"wisdom" about advanced nuclear was wrong. So he came out in favor of the IFR.
He was quickly denounced by his peers (see
Mark Lynas: the green heretic persecuted for his nuclear conversion).
He offered Greenpeace a chance to respond on the
Mark Lynas blog, and also published
Blees' rebuttal to the Greenpeace comments. Here are some of the reader comments
from Blees' rebuttal (since at that point readers could evaluate both sides):

Regardless of what Greenpeace states on environmental grounds, they are
not independent and not objective. They have no reason to want nuclear power
in any form even if they want to resolve AGW
issues.

Thank you Tom for your article and also to Mark for posting it for us. A
clear, concise and informative article which for me would seem to illustrate
sensibly that nuclear power is not only viable in every way but also
relatively safe. Additionally of course as Tom says we should explore and
invest in renewables. What a great position it would be to not need nuclear
power in the future, although like many I think we will need it. I will
leave those better qualified to argue the science here but Tom’s points are
well made. I await Greenpeace’s response again with baited breath!

An eloquent and in-depth rebuttal, Mr. Blees. If only all solutions were
as rock solid as this one…

Thank you Tom for you rebuttal. Nuclear is here for the foreseeable
future and in some places growing. There are also no guarantees that
renewables can replace fossil fuels within the uncertain timeframe, even
with the desired demand side reduction. On this basis alone I’m convinced
that it would be logical to invest in testing S-PRISM. It sounds a little
too good to be true and may well be just another pipe dream. But again
that’s an argument for getting the testing done.

We seemed to be stuck in old school debate as usual; Mark Lynas and/or
Tom Blees presents an optimistic picture, while Greenpeace presents the
negative one. It kind of makes it difficult to take either side seriously.
Most of us readers aren’t educated enough to know which bit we should be
throwing our pinch of salt on.

In the meantime, nuclear is becoming smaller and more affordable

Summary of IFR benefits

energy security

global stability

environmental quality

anthropogenic global warming

nuclear waste

You can justify the investment on just the waste problem alone, but the IFR is
far more important. Calculations from a number of respected sources indicates
that renewables are insufficient to solve our energy problems. That leaves
nuclear. Even NRDC admits that. But the best nuclear by far is the IFR because
existing nuclear is not sustainable (we'll run out of fuel unless we use breeder
reactors like the IFR) and has higher costs and risks than IFRs. The IFR is
simply a better nuclear design that is currently our best option as we move
forward.

References on why renewables are insufficient to solve the climate
crisis

Energy Secretary Chu, the President of MIT, and the renewable experts at the
most recent Aspen Institute Energy Forum all agree that it is not responsible to
believe that you can solve the climate crisis without nuclear. Here are a few
more references.

Australia:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25817955-601,00.html.
MINING giant Rio Tinto has urged Kevin Rudd to immediately begin
work on a regulatory regime allowing use of nuclear energy in
Australia, arguing the viability of energy alternatives has been
dramatically overstated. The company has advised the government to
consider "every option" for power generation because its pledges on
reducing carbon emissions and using renewable energy will expose
industry and consumers to huge increases in their power bills. And
it says that overly optimistic assumptions on the viability of
alternatives such as wind and geothermal power, as well as so-called
clean coal technologies, have created a "false optimism" which the
government must challenge by commissioning new research.
Some regions of Australia
will not be located near good renewable energy resources or
sufficient geological storage formations for CCS," the
submission says. In these circumstances
nuclear energy may provide the optimum clear, reliable and
affordable energy option."

UK: http://www.withouthotair.com
is particular good. David MacKay examines five plans for the UK to move a
pure renewable society. The conclusion is that renewables are not
sufficient: "Any plan that doesn’t make heavy use of nuclear power or “clean
coal” has to make up the energy balance using renewable power bought in from
other countries."

Japan: In particular, here's a description of Japan's quandry with respect to
renewables:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/07/19/we-need-a-real-global-plan-for-carbon-mitigation/. Here's a statement from Japan's Federation of Electric Power (FEPC) companies
on why renewables, while desirable, are not sufficient:
http://www.japannuclear.com/nuclearpower/program/why.html says: Alternative
energy sources such as solar and wind power are also attractive options in that
they are clean and inexhaustible. And while their use will no doubt grow over
the years, such resources remain hamstrung by a variety of drawbacks, from their
susceptibility to the vagaries of weather and poor energy conversion rates to
inferior cost efficiency. Continuous efforts will be made in research and
development in order to utilize such alternative energy sources. However, until
the technological hurdles obstructing them - and there are many - are overcome,
nuclear power remains among the most viable means of power generation.

Cost
of Nuclear Power: The IFR cost is estimated by GE to be about $1,500 per kW.
The first two ABWR's were commissioned in Japan in 1996 and 1997. These took
just over 3 years to construct and were completed on budget. Their construction
costs were around $2000 per KW. The Chinese Nuclear Power
Industry has won contracts to build new plants of their own design at capital
costs
reported to be $1500 per KW and $1300 per KW at sites in South-East and
North-East China. If completed on budget these facilities will be formidable
competitors to the Western Nuclear Power Industry. If the AP1000 lives up to its
promises of $1000 per KW construction cost and 3 year construction time, it will
provide cheaper electricity than any other Fossil Fuel based generating
facility, including Australian Coal power, even with no sequestration charges.

Here it is: Cost of 2 x Chinese CPR-1000 nuclear reactors cited as US$3.8
billion - that's $1,760/KW if they come in on budget: http://tr.im/uPNR .
Contrast that with the $8-10,000 often cited for building these in the USA. S

However, until there is competitive bidding on these reactors, it
is admitted hard to assess the true cost.

In California, PG&E says that nuclear is the second cheapest power (the lowest
cost is hydro but hydro isn't scalable).
Diablo Canyon cost $5.52B according to the New York Times for 2.2GW of
power. They need $1B every 20 years. The plant will probably last 60 years. So
over 60 years, that's $7.5B invested to generate 2.2GW*24*365*60 GW of power
which is less than 1 cent per kWh (.89 cents actually). But some of that power
is wasted because it can't be used. And the capacity factor of one reactor is
>101% and the other is 88.2%. So that increases the cost per kWh. And Diablo was
very expensive due to the protestors and a costly engineering (mirror image)
mistake. Even with all that, you can see the power is VERY VERY cheap.

Today, modular reactors are much less expensive than Diablo Canyon. Using
multiple small reactors at a site allows you to shut down a reactor if needed
and still deliver plenty of power. They are also cheaper to produce (since they
are produced in a factory like cars) and more reliable since these are mass
manufactured rather than 1 off designs.

Worldwide, nuclear power is undergoing a renaissance. There are 45 so-called
generation III reactors under construction, including 12 in China, and another
388 are planned or proposed.

One of the biggest problems with the American reactor program and why it
stalled in the '70s and '80s, Three Mile Island notwithstanding, was that
the costs were escalating. When it cost $300 million to build a reactor in
1972 and it cost $6 billion in the early '80s, something has gone terribly
wrong. Part of that was the legal suits that extended the reactor
certification time over to a period of decades. So part of it was the
anti-nuclear movement that did that, but also a part of it was each design
was different. So everything was built anew, new features were tried out,
every design needed a special certificate to actually be built and then
another certificate to be run. So the whole system ultimately was set up to
fail and things became more and more expensive.

If you can have a system
where you have a standardized design with components that are built to a
particular specification, if you can have components that are built in a
factory and shipped to site rather than everything needed to be constructed
on site, if you have modules where they're smaller such as they can be put
on a rail car or on a large truck and taken to site and the many of these
units put together to constitute a plant, then you can start to see that
there's huge benefits in terms of efficiency, the fact that you don't need a
standardized certificate for each and every new reactor, that there are
economic benefits in building multiple units at a given factory. The places
where this is happening is China and India right now. So although these have
often been blamed as some of the worst carbon polluters, ultimately and
ironically they could be the nations that lead us out of the carbon economy
and into a low carbon economy based on nuclear power.
AP-1000's made in China are expected to cost only around $1,000 per kW (see
AP-1000 Reactor being built in China - current summary and possible problems)..

From New Life for Nuclear Power
by ALVIN M. WEINBERG

Making a significant contribution to CO2 control
would require a roughly 10-fold increase in the world's nuclear capacity. If
nuclear reactors receive normal maintenance, they will "never" wear out, and
this will profoundly affect the economic performance of the reactors. Time
annihilates capital costs. The economic Achilles' heel of nuclear energy has
been its high capital cost. In this respect, nuclear energy resembles
renewable energy sources such as wind turbines, hydroelectric facilities,
and photovoltaic cells, which have high capital costs but low operating
expenses. If a reactor lasts beyond its amortization time, the burden of
debt falls drastically. Indeed, according to one estimate, fully amortized
nuclear reactors with total electricity production costs (operation and
maintenance, fuel, and capital costs) below 2 cents per kilowatt hour are
possible.

Electricity that inexpensive would make it economically feasible to power
operations such as seawater desalinization, fulfilling a dream that was
common in the early days of nuclear power.

What's been reported in Green
Car Congress is misleading. Progress Energy Florida
plans to build two nuclear units at their Levy
County site. In the process of getting approval of
the Florida Public Utility Commission, they
submitted estimated project cost, which was very,
very conservative -- I don't recall the numbers but
they assumed high cost of money, high inflation
rate, etc. And probably they doubled the capital
costs that vendors were talking about. They wanted
set the upper bounds so that they don't have come
back to the PUC for revised cost estimates once the
project was approved. As long as they carry out the
project within the approved budget, they don't have
to revisit the issue. The Green Car Congress
assumed, based on the Florida numbers, $9448/kW
which leads to 20 cents/kwhr at 14.57% fixed charge
rate and O&M cost (including 2 cents/kwhr fuel cycle
cost) of 8 cents/kwhr. The capital cost is probably
a factor of 4 or so high and also the same for O&M.
Today's total generating cost is less than 2 cents/kwhr
and the fuel cycle cost is 0.55 cents/kwhr.

Progrss Energy Florida has
not signed a construction contract yet, so we don't
know what the project cost will be. In fact, all 16
utilities who filed NRC license applications for 26
reactors have not signed contracts yet. Maybe the
only exception might be NRG who is building ABWR in
Texas. The capital costs for the next series of LWRs
remain illusive. The estimate of $1000/kW for
AP-1000 is probably too optimistic (with initial
cost of $3500/kW in the U.S. About 60% of the
reactors built in the last two decades or so
probably is in the Southeast Asia. Typical costs
there have been $2000-2500/kWe with construction
period of less than four years. It behooves me why
we cannot do the same in this country. Different
labor rates or commodities costs do not explain it.
I am concerned with the experience of the new
Olkiluoto plant in Finland based on AREVA's 1600 MWe
EPR. The project was to be completed this year,
but the original fixed price cost has escalated by
50% with 3.5 years delay. I hope this is not a sign
that will be repeated here again.

Barry wrote:

Steve, I wouldn't take that Florida price at face value. After all, there
was the $26B figure coming out of Ontario recently (AECL and AREVA both came
up with similar bids), and it took a bit of digging for me to find out what
was behind that 'blowout'. Turns out the LCOE was a mere 5c/kWh: http://wp.me/piCIJ-qx

I disagree with Ralph from NRDC in his confidence that regulatory ratcheting
is a thing of the past (RR was, in my reading of history, the primary thing
that killed NP construction in the US) -- there is nothing enshrined in law
to guarantee that, which is one thing that makes the utilities nervous, I
suspect.

Dan wrote:

Yoon et al: Similar experience here in Ontario. The RFP asked the vendor
to assume 100% of the risk with massive contingencies, full risk coverage
for the whole life of the plant, etc., etc. I was surprised that the AECL
and AREVA bids came in as low as they did.

The Ontario government behaved as if they were making every attempt to
create an unbearable contract price. The anti-nukes were (and are) very
happy.

Bottom line: Keep a close watch on the AP-1000 and ESBWR. In less than 4
years the first AP1000s should be coming on line in China. Additionally, the
Chinese themselves have learned extensively from both S. Korea and Japan that
have bought in reactors ahead of schedule and under or at budget. So it’s not
entirely new territory we’re talking about.

Nuclear cost vs. solar

To compare with solar, for $50K, you can buy a solar rooftop system that has 8MWh annual output. So
if you assume the annual output is actually completely steady 24x7, then that is
producing an average of 913watts. So you spent $54,000 for a continuous KW of
energy production capacity. So rooftop solar is 36 times more expensive than
nuclear per watt installed (assuming nuclear at $1,500 per kW which is the GE IFR estimate which is below the $2,000 actual cost for the first two ABWRs in
japan).

If the solar system works the same for 25 years, the cost per kwh of the
power is $50,000/200,000= .25 per kwh. That's assuming no cost of capital for
the $50K investment! So if you are an energy hog and you are getting hit paying
44 cents for a lot of your power, then solar panels actually can make sense. But
in general, there are much more efficient ways to get the power than rooftop
solar (see
http://shearerinsanity.blogspot.com/2009/03/rooftop-solar.html).

There was
a study of the
real costs PV systems done in the UK that found results very similar to my
calculation. They looked at a number of systems and the cheapest was slightly
more than 20 pence per kWh assuming a 25 lifetime. That's 33 cents/kWh which is
not far from my number. They also looked at the payback time compared to grid
power and found that the most efficient installation would have to run for at
least 45 years to make it a better deal than grid power. And the worst
installation would have to run for 296 years before it would be a better deal
than grid power. It short, all of the systems are a dumb investment; you never
get your money back.

So it's actually 86 times cheaper to install nuclear capacity (not quite as much
since you have to pay people to run your nuclear plant). Also, the nuclear
capacity works 24x7. To utilize that 913W you would have to have a large,
expensive and relatively short-lived (perhaps 10 years) battery to store energy
when produced in excess, and to deliver power on demand when the sun isn't
shining. So the system cost will be substantially higher than the figure I
calculated. Or, you can use the grid for that storage/backup purpose -- but if
everyone did that, well, it just wouldn't work, for obvious reasons, so grid
backup cannot be part of a large-scale PV energy solution.

By looking at the limit position, the paper highlights the very high
costs imposed by mandating and subsidising solar power. The minimum power
output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s
economic viability. The capital cost would be 25 times more than nuclear
power. The least-cost solar option would require 400 times more land area
and emit 20 times more CO2 than nuclear power.

Conclusions: PV solar power is uneconomic. Government
mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these
additional costs must be carried by others

Nuclear Safety

If you live next door to a nuclear reactor, there are a number of
radiological studies done on a hypothetical person called Fencepost Man who's
supposed to have his house on the fencepost on the boundary of a nuclear power
site. He would get approximately one millirem of radiation more than the general
public, and that might sound like a lot but in fact the general public gets over
300 millirems of radiation each year just from natural sources. So essentially
there's no difference between living next door to a nuclear power plant and
living in most other places in the world. And indeed, if you live on top of a
granite intrusion you'd get about twice that. So people tend to be a bit
irrational about radiation and we need to have a bit of an education campaign
about that too.

Nuclear
is one of the lowest risk forms of energy on a kWh basis

In the entire 50 year history of
commercial nuclear in the United States, it is estimated that one person might
have died. That was due to radiation release in the Three Mile Island accident
(more below).

Modern reactors are designed on the
principle of being inherently safe, and what that means is they have a number of
design principles that are based on the laws of physics. So in order for them to
melt down or explode there would have to be an extraordinary set of
circumstances where you would have multiple systems failing, and in the new
reactors that are being proposed, even more than that, you would have to have
the laws of physics being violated, which of course is not particularly likely.

Design safety of modern day reactors are orders of magnitude better than
original nuclear plants.

A Reactor Safety Study (RSS) was conducted in 1975 by Norman Rasmussen of MIT
under NRC sponsorship. This probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) study was also
known as the Rasmussen report and WASH-1400. The RSS estimated that at the
time (mid 70s) a reactor meltdown may be expected about once every 20,000 years
of reactor operation; that is, if there were 100 reactors, there would be a
meltdown once in 200 years. Three Mile Island (TMI) was NOT a full meltdown --
only partial, and it was still a watershed regarding changing safety systems and
training (and the fateful regulatory ratcheting, but that's another story).
There have been 400 water-moderated commercial reactors running for 30 years.
That's 12,000 reactor years, with one partial meltdown (so far) -- entirely
consistent with the prediction of an average of one meltdown every 20,000 years.
And nobody was hurt. (Chernobyl doesn't count -- not water-moderated & not
analyzed.)

The authors of the two principal reports on the Three Mile Island
accident1, 2 agree that even if there had been a complete
meltdown in that reactor, there very probably would have been essentially no
harm to human health and no environmental damage. I know of no technical
reports that have claimed otherwise. Moreover, all scientific studies agree
that in the great majority of meltdown accidents there would be no
detectable effects on human health, immediately or in later years. According
to the government estimate, a meltdown would have to occur every week or so
somewhere in the United States before nuclear power would be as dangerous as
coal burning.

A thorough risk assessment was done on the GE-Hitachi ESBWR and found that a Three Mile Island style meltdown accident could
occur once every 29 million reactor years. As you can see, a PRA puts the ESBWR about 3 orders of magnitude safer than
the Gen II designs of the 1960s (and these have all been improved with later
modifications).

Today's LWRs (i.e., those currently being built) incorporate safety
features that are far beyond our current reactors (most of which were built 30
years ago) by orders of magnitude. Newer fourth generation reactors are even
better since they rely on passive safety guaranteed by the laws of physics. They
tested this to prove it would work: they disabled all the safety systems on the
EBR-II reactor and all the alarms went off, but the reactor just shut down on
its own with no release of radiation.

Chernobyl was a special type of reactor
built by the Russians to breed plutonium for bombs, so it had a graphite core
and it meant that if you had problems in the reactor where the water flow would
stop, it would actually run out of control. No American reactor can actually do
that. And Chernobyl also lacked a containment building, which was another
problem because when it started a graphite fire all of the radioactive material
was dispersed into the air, another disaster. That also can't happen in an
American reactor. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor design
would never have been approved in the US for a civilian power plant.
Chernobyl was a RBMK type power plant.
There are only a handful of these in the US and all of them are used for
military purposes. There are no civilian RBMK power plants in the US generating
commercial electricity. RBMK are considered unsafe for civilian use by the US
Government. Only socialists use technology like that in populated areas.
Current [obsolete] technology US
Commercial Nuclear Power Plants are mostly Pressurized Water Reactors. TMI was
one of these. Boiling Water Reactors comprise the rest.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/reactors/dresden.html

These water reactors cannot have the kind of accident Chernobyl had. It is not
physically possible.

Secondly, the operators allowed the
scientists to experiment on the reactor and disable many of the safety systems. That's why it's important for the US
to take a lead in having other countries adopt our designs rather than build
their own. If we bury our head in the sand and pretend nuclear will go away, we
are making a huge mistake. We should be taking a leadership role in reactor
design and operator training, worldwide.

As far as Three Mile Island, the
reactor was damaged but nobody was killed or injured from the radiation. Three
Mile Island was a lesson where there was poor training of staff and a failed
system for notifying the staff of actually what was happening. And so they made
mistakes such as opening valves when they should have been shutting them and
letting water in when they shouldn't have. But Three Mile Island didn't hurt
anyone. There were no fatalities, there was no radioactivity of any note
released into the environment. So even in that worst-case scenario for an
American reactor there were essentially no problems. But of course the reactor
was destroyed, it cost millions of dollars, and it set back the American nuclear
program by decades really because of the effect on public opinion. That's
gradually changed. The
accident resulted in improved operator training and the creation of more safety
systems. According to the Report of the President's Commission on The Accident
At Three Mile Island (the
Kemeny
Commission Report): "Just
how serious was the accident? Based on our investigation of the health effects
of the accident, we conclude that in spite of serious damage to the plant, most
of the radiation was contained and the actual release will have a negligible
effect on the physical health of individuals. The major health effect of the
accident was found to be mental stress.... It is entirely possible that not a
single extra cancer death will result. And for all our estimates, it is
practically certain that the additional number of cancer deaths will be less
than 10."

Based on residential proximity and travel into and out of a 5-mile area
during the 10 days after the accident, scientists estimated maximum and
likely whole-body gamma exposures for each individual. The estimated average
likely and maximum gamma doses were 0.09 mSv or 9 mrem and 0.25 mSv or 25
mrem, respectively. The range of likely gamma exposure was estimated to be
1-170 mrem. The average annual effective dose from natural background
radiation in the
United StatesUnited States is estimated to be
approximately 3 mSv (300 mrem) [Committee on the Biological Effects of
Ionizing Radiation (BEIR
BEIR Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations V) 1990]. These
exposures were therefore considered minimal.

....

In conclusion, the
mortality surveillance of this cohort, with a total of almost 20 years of
follow-up, provides no consistent evidence that radioactivity released
during the TMI accident (estimated maximum and likely gamma exposure) has
had a significant impact on the mortality experience of this cohort through
1998.

A court-ordered study finds no "convincing evidence" of inceased cancer
risk among people exposed to radiation from the Three Mile Island nuclear
power plant.

The findings are "consistent with all the medical and
scientific evidence we have so far," says physicist Jacob I. Fabrikant of
the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California,
Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California,
United States. Commonly referred to as UC Berkeley, Berkeley and Cal , who
served on the staff of the 1979 presidential commission that investigated
the accident. That panel concluded that the amount of radiation released
during the mishap was a fraction of the region's normal annual background
radiation from cosmic and geologic sources, and it predicted a maximum of
one excess cancer death from the accident.

To compare the historical safety record of civilian nuclear energy with
the historical record of other forms of electrical generation, Ball,
Roberts, and Simpson, the
IAEA, and the Paul Scherrer Institut found in separate studies that
during the period from
1970 -
1992, there
were just 39 on-the-job deaths of nuclear power plant workers, while during
the same time period, there were 6,400 on-the-job deaths of
coal power plant workers, 1,200 on-the-job deaths of
natural gas power plant workers and members of the general public caused
by
natural gas power plants, and 4,000 deaths of members of the general
public caused by
hydroelectric power plants.[3][4][5]
In particular,
coal power plants are estimated to kill 24,000 Americans per year, due
to lung disease[6]
as well as causing 40,000 heart attacks per year[7]
in the United States. According to esteemed journal
Scientific American, the average
coal power plant emits more than 100 times as much radiation per year
than a comparatively sized nuclear power plant does, in the form of
toxic
coal waste known as
fly ash.[8]

Current Gen III LWRs ARE inherently safe – the AP1000, for instance, uses
a range of systems based on the laws of physics (in addition to engineered
interventions), such as gravity-induced convention in the containment dome and
emergency cooling takes that are forced by pressurised nitrogen and reliant on
heat-based recirculation – that’s why it’s called the “Advanced Passive 1000”.
It’s just the IFR does it more efficiently thanks to the properties of liquid
metal coolants and metal fuels.

More on Chernobyl

After my Monday e mail Neil Brown and Barry Brook asked me
about the book very recently published by the New York Academy of Sciences
"Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment'' by
A. Yablokov, V Nesterenko, and A Nesterenko. This reminded me that, being
retired, I may not be as up to date on Chernobyl health effects as I thought.
So I got on Google and checked to see what has been published in the past few
years.

At the 20 year period after the 1986 accident the World
Health Organization (WHO) issued a report that appears to be very carefully
researched and prepared. It included input from experts in many organizations
and countries. It was clearly designed to be the defninitive report on
Chernobyl health effects. The conclusions were essentially the same as in the
OECD ten year report and the UN fourteen year report, as summarized in my e mail
of Monday, 4/26. The WHO report also estimated the possible additional deaths,
based on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model, for two groups of people in the
three countries, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. For the 826,000 individuals in
the most highly exposed groups (liquidators, evacuees, and residents in the most
contaminated zones) they estimated up to 4,000 additional deaths. Remember some
of these individuals, especially the liquidators, received massive doses of
radiation. This is a 3-4% increase over the normal cancer death rate for this
group. For the 5 million residents of areas that received doses slightly above
background, they estimated up to 5,000 additional deaths. For the rest of
Europe they state that the increased cancer deaths will be very small and
undetectable.

Now back to the book mentioned by Neil and Barry. Of the
authors, Yablokov, is Russian and the other two authors are from Belarus. This
book

claims that 985,000 people have died worldwide from
Chernobyl fallout as of 2004. It also claims that the radioactivity released
from Chernobyl was 200 times greater than other estimates. The authors claim
their results are based on about 5,000 reports, most in Slavic languages, never
before available in English. It is important to note here that the WHO report
specifically indicates input from the governments of Russia, Belarus, and
Ukraine. Presumably the experts in these three countries had access to the same
reports referred to in the Yablokov, New York Academy of Sciences book.

There are several other more recent Chernobyl health effect
studies listed in Google. I only looked at them briefly. They were certainly
not in the same league with the WHO study, and they were mostly from
organizations with an agenda.

I'm new to the group. Chuck Till signed me up earlier this
year. My name is Leo LeSage and I retired from Argonne about 12 years ago after
working on the Argonne reactor program for over 32 years.

Today is the 24th anniversary of the accident at Chernobyl.
There was no mention of Chernobyl in today's Chicago Tribune, but in previous
years the accident has been covered in the news this time of year, and the
health effects of the accident have frequently been wildly exaggerated. During
the 1990s I was involved in several aspects of Chernobyl and made several trips
to Chernobyl. Although I am an engineer (not a health professional) I made a
point of collecting all the creditable reports on the health effects associated
with the accident. The following is a letter I wrote to my local newspaper
concerning an article that appeared in 2003. I believe that the information in
my letter is still valid as there has been little published on Chernobyl health
effects in the past few years.

Dear Editor:

An article in the April 28, 2003 Naperville Sun titled
"Mourners Mark the 17th Anniversary of Chernobyl" indicated that 4,400 peopole
were killed by radiation related diseases in Ukraine alone as a result of the
Chernobyl accident. This is total nonsense, although not unexpected, since
there has been an enormous amount of false information put out about the effects
of Chernobyl. Much of it has been distributed by indicivuals or groups with an
agenda.

There have been at least two definitive studies of the
health impacts of Chernobyl, conducted by respected health professionals and
epidemiologists from a broad spectrum of countries. The first was at 10 years
after the accident and was conducted by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, Nuclear Energy Agency. Its conclusions were:

- Of the 237 individuals that received the largest
radiation doses 28 died, all within a few weeks. The others, although going
through a period of sickness, survived.

- The only measurable latent effect was a large
increase in thyroid cancer, primarily among children. At that time there were
about 700 excess cases but only 3 deaths. Thyroid cancer is
slowly developing and generally treatable.

At the 14-year mark after the accident the United Nations
Scientific Commiittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued a report. Their
conclusions were no different than those reached in the 10-year report. The
report stated "Apart from the substantial increase in thyroid cancer after
childhood exposure, there is no evidence of a major public health impact related
to ionizing radiation 14 years after the Chernobyl accident. No increases in
overall cancer incidences or mortality that could be associated with radiation
exposure have been observed." They go on to indicate that some delayed health
effects may yet appear and the number of cases of thyroid cancer will increase.
In another area, the UN study concludes, "So far no increase in birth defects,
congenital malformations, stillbirths, or premature births could be linked to
radiation exposures caused by the accident."

Chernobyl had a devastating economic and social impact on
Ukraine and a number of people have been killed by the the accident. But there
is absolutely no solid evidence to support the claim that "4,400 people in
Ukraine alone were killed by the accident." The true number so far is certainly
less that 100.

Sincerely,

Leo G. LeSage

Nuclear waste

here's a reference from
wikipedia page on
nuclear_power:
Overall, nuclear power produces far less waste material than fossil-fuel based
power plants. Coal-burning plants are particularly noted for producing large
amounts of toxic and mildly radioactive ash due to concentrating naturally
occurring metals and radioactive material from the coal. Contrary to popular
belief, coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released
into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose
equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear
plants.[74]

The waste of LWR is actually incredibly safe compared to other energy
technologies – about 5000 times safer than coal, for instance, based on a
standard Loss of Life Expectancy (LLE) risk assessment (NOT counting
climate-related damage). This is a great read:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter11.html

But of course if you only have to deal with fission products and can recycle and
use all the TRUs (which is true when using an IFR), the story is even better!

Worker safety

The nuclear industry in the United States has maintained one of the best
industrial safety records in the world with respect to all kinds of accidents.
For 2008, the industry hit a new low of 0.13 industrial accidents per 200,000
worker-hours.[28]
This is improved over 0.24 in 2005, which was still a factor of 14.6 less than
the 3.5 number for all manufacturing industries.[29]
Private industry has an accident rate of 1.3 per 200,000 worker hours.[30]

Uranium supply

See Once-through, using uranium from the oceans

Insurance

Some anti-nuke people say nobody will insure nuclear plants. Here's the
response from Rod Adams:

All nuclear plants in the US carry a
required $300 million in private insurance and sign up to be part of a group
insurance policy where all of the members are the owners of all of the other
reactors in the country. If there is a claim against a nuclear facility that
exceeds their private insurance, the members of the group kick in as much as $98
million each for a total pool of $10 Billion.

The only claims ever paid out in relationship to this system have been well
below the private insurance limit. The pool has never
kicked in and no taxpayer funds have ever been expended.

Compare that to the airline industry and the payouts that the government had to
make back in 2001.

CO2 emissions

On the carbon front, there is some CO2
emissions during the construction and as a result of fuel enrichment. The CO2
outputs of a nuclear plant are very, VERY low on a per kWh basis compared with
other sources. It actually beats out wind and solar! - it is a little worse than
hydro, since hydro has no fuel CO2 emissions over its lifecyle.

The "it produces plutonium argument"

See
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/07/is-our-future-nuclear/ where the anti
nuclear guy says fourth generation breeder reactors produce plutonium. Heck,
every nuclear reactor produces plutonium. But the IFRs consume the plutonium and
the IFR's don't require enrichment. Those are 2 key points. I particular enjoyed
this comment:

It is like saying car engine factories produce engine blocks and this
maximizes the risk of guns.

To work in that context, there would have to be a single word for any
round channel in which expanding combustion gases propel a slider. He’s
counting on the single word “plutonium” to mean two different things,
without his audience knowing that it means two different things (a fallacy
of equivocation).

I doubt Noonan expects any country or group to get nuclear weapons
because it has power reactors. None ever has. Power reactors, if fed 238-U,
make power reactor plutonium. Much cooler, smaller, simpler, cheaper
reactors make weapon-grade plutonium, as different from the other kind as is
a gun barrel from an Ecotec engine block.

The theoretical usability of the engine block as a multibarrel cannon
represents a very long way around to a very inferior result, weapon-wise.
Using power reactor plutonium for weapons is similarly believed to be a long
way around to an inferior result, and so has apparently never been tried.

(When the American gas industry’s Hazel O’Leary was in public office, her
government published a claim to this effect, but acknowledged that the yield
of the bomb that was produced may have been zero, and did not acknowledge
that the supposedly power-reactor-derived plutonium was quite unlike any
being made today. More at Jeremy Whitlock’s “Canadian Nuclear FAQ”.)

The terrorist attack scenario argument

The
WWF position paper on nuclear energy which is included in
Climate Solutions - WWF's Vision for 2050 references a UCS study
Impacts of a Terrorist Attack at Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant which says a properly done terrorist attack could
result in 44,000 short term deaths and eventually kill 518,000 people from
cancer. The economic damages within 100 miles would exceed $1.1 trillion for the
95th percentile case, and could be as great as $2.1 trillion for the worst case
evaluated, based on Environmental Protection Agency guidance for population
relocation and cleanup. Millions of people would require permanent relocation.

So WWF could have written a paper saying we shouldn't have buildings and
airplanes because under a worst case scenario, they can combine to cause $2
trillion in damage and thousands of deaths.

And Greenpeace would argue that we shouldn't have any chemical plants at all
since
15,000 are a ripe target for sabatoge. They argue that a study by the Army
surgeon general, conducted soon after 9/11, found that up to 2.4 million people
could be killed or wounded by a terrorist attack on a single chemical plant. So
chemical plants are far more dangerous than our worse case nuclear attack.
Should we now shut down all chemical plants?

The problem with the WWF scenario is that they never tell you what the
likelihood of such an event happening really is.

Studies have been done to show that containment buildings would withstand the
impact of a fully fueled jet aircraft. This scenario involves essentially a
hollow tube of aluminium and steel, holding a few hundred thousand litres of
gasoline, colliding with a heavily reinformed concrete dome designed to contain
extreme internal steam pressure. Some relevant comments re: that particular
Indian Point scenario are here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/indian-point-worst-case-nuclear.html

The $2 trillion figure, even if you accept their assumptions (which are highly
disputable), is the 99.9th percentile. That is, this cost would be incurred once
in every 1,000 plane hits to a reactor like nuclear point. Of course if you bury
an IFR, the risk is virtually zero. This is an example of disingenous people
taking advantage of the general populace's gross ignorance on the matter of risk
and probability.

"It is very difficult
to predict the future of scientific developments, and few would even dare to
make predictions extending beyond the next 50 years. However, based on
everything we know now, one can make a strong case for the thesis that nuclear
fission reactors will be providing a large fraction of our energy needs for the
next million years. If that should come to pass, a history of energy production
written at that remote date may well record that the worst reactor accident of
all time occurred at Chernobyl, USSR, in April of 1986."

...and think this section is useful:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter6.html Truly, the possibilities
are limited only by ones imagination, and as the previous WWF treatment of
nuclear emissions showed, the imaginations of those folks runs way, way into
fantasy land.

The Worst Possible Accident

One subject we have not
discussed here is the "worst possible nuclear accident," because there is no
such thing. In any field of endeavor, it is easy to concoct a possible
accident scenario that is worse than anything that has been previously
proposed, although it will be of lower probability. One can imagine a
gasoline spill causing a fire that would wipe out a whole city, killing most
of its inhabitants. It might require a lot of improbable circumstances
combining together, like water lines being frozen to prevent effective fire
fighting, a traffic jam aggravated by street construction or traffic
accidents limiting access to fire fighters, some substandard gas lines which
the heat from the fire caused to leak, a high wind frequently shifting to
spread the fire in all directions, a strong atmospheric temperature
inversion after the whole city has become engulfed in flame to keep the
smoke close to the ground, a lot of bridges and tunnels closed for various
reasons, eliminating escape routes, some errors in advising the public, and
so forth. Each of these situations is improbable, so a combination of many
of them occurring in sequence is highly improbable, but it is certainly not
impossible.

If anyone thinks that is the
worst possible consequence of a gasoline spill, consider the possibility of
the fire being spread by glowing embers to other cities which were left
without protection because their firefighters were off assisting the first
city; or of a disease epidemic spawned by unsanitary conditions left by the
conflagration spreading over the country; or of communications foul-ups and
misunderstandings caused by the fire leading to an exchange of nuclear
weapon strikes. There is virtually no limit to the damage that is possible
from a gasoline spill. But as the damage envisioned increases, the number of
improbable circumstances required increases, so the probability for the
eventuality becomes smaller and smaller. There is no such thing as the
"worst possible accident," and any consideration of what terrible accidents
are possible without simultaneously considering their low probability is a
ridiculous exercise that can lead to completely deceptive conclusions.

The same reasoning applies to
nuclear reactor accidents. Situations causing any number of deaths are
possible, but the greater the consequences, the lower is the probability.
The worst accident the RSS considered would cause about 50,000 deaths, with
a probability of one occurrence in a billion years of reactor operation. A
person's risk of being a victim of such an accident is 20,000 times less
than the risk of being killed by lightning, and 1,000 times less than the
risk of death from an airplane crashing into his or her house.7

But this
once-in-a-billion-year accident is practically the only nuclear reactor
accident ever discussed in the media. When it is discussed, its probability
is hardly ever mentioned, and many people, including Helen Caldicott, who
wrote a book on the subject, imply that it's the consequence of an average
meltdown rather than of 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns. I have frequently been
told that the probability doesn't matter — the very fact that such an
accident is possible makes nuclear power unacceptable. According to that way
of thinking, we have shown that the use of gasoline is not acceptable, and
almost any human activity can similarly be shown to be unacceptable. If
probability didn't matter, we would all die tomorrow from any one of
thousands of dangers we live with constantly.

The "nuclear reprocessing is dangerous even if you use pyroprocessing" argument

According to a report from a 1999 workshop
at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL), the transuranic elements or
other actinides in spent fuel could be used to build
nuclear weapons:
Examination of various cycles and the opinions
of weapons-design experts lead to the conclusion
that there is no ‘proliferation-proof’ nuclear power
cycle. Explosive Fissionable Material (EFM)
includes most of the actinides and their oxides.168
Dr. Bruce Goodwin of LLNL also maintained
at the workshop that “as nuclear weapons design
and engineering expertise combined with sufficient
technical capability become more common
in the world, it becomes possible to make nuclear
weapons out of an increasing number of technically
challenging explosive fissionable materials.”169
In other words, it is unwarranted to assume that
terrorists could not acquire the ability to build
nuclear weapons with the mixture of plutonium
and other actinides produced by UREX+.

A number of articles about making bombs from reprocessed material are
available at

scroll down to articles published in Physics & Society. The one titled Purex
and Pyro refers to a LLL briefing that makes it clear that pyroprocessed fuel
(Note that UCS concentrates on UREX+) is essentially useless for bombs.

Here are a few excerpts:

In his 1993 paper, J. Carson Mark wrote: “The difficulties of
developing an effective design of the most straightforward type are
not appreciably greater with reactor-grade plutonium than those
that have to be met for the use of weapons-grade plutonium.”[4]
That was based on his calculations, and on his apparent opinion
that the heat problem is trivial. However, to our knowledge no
weapons program, anywhere, ever, has made another attempt to
produce an explosion with reactor-grade plutonium. It is extremely
likely that the 1962 test demonstrated that reactor grade plutonium
is lousy material for making bombs, and that no nation, given the
data from that test, would want to use the stuff.

While the difference in weapons potential is one of degree rather
than principle, that difference is huge. The point is not that it can’t
be done, but rather that a would-be proliferator has far easier routes
to nuclear weapons.

By the way, it has sometimes been asserted that the chemically
impure plutonium produced by the pyrometallurgical process could
be used to make a bomb without further separation. This has been
convincingly refuted in an unpublished investigation by Livermore
National Laboratory (1994),which concluded that the transuranic
impurities render the material far too hot (thermally and
radioactively), and with far too many spontaneous neutrons, to
make it at all feasible.

Anyway, it is very much easier to make a bomb with highly
enriched uranium than with reactor grade plutonium. That route
would surely be taken by any organization that did not have access
to weapons-grade plutonium.

But making a bomb from highly enriched uranium is very very hard. And you'd
still have to purify it to have any chance of success, and then make a reliable
weapon out of it. And if you know how to do all that, then getting the material
is going to be the least of your problems.

There are two scenarios here: either you think the terrorists are dumb or
they are really smart. If they are dumb, they'll fail. If they are really smart,
they'll know that the only way to realistically have any chance of making a bomb
is to partner with a country like North Korea which already has the bombs. The
scenario where they steal material, purify it, and build a bomb from scratch is
unrealistic. Even highly organized countries with huge financial and scientific
resources have a tough time making nuclear weapons. The easiest route for any
terrorist is to partner with a rogue state who hates the United States and has
nuclear weapons. The hardest route is to use the reactor waste product or
pyroprocessed output. If you can do it with that, then eliminating
pyroprocessing really isn't going to be much of a hurdle.

In any case, the IFR certainly isn't going to make a terrorist's task any
easier than it is now.

The "nuclear gets huge subsidies" argument

I’d done a similar number crunch in response to an argument by a commenter
on my website about nuclear power being heavily subsidised. Here is my
reply, and a good follow-on comment by another guy who works for a CA
utility:

————
Many people are concerned that nuclear has received the lion’s share of
government funds. In the US (for which I have figures), Federal DOE energy
subsidies for solar+wind amounted to $0.026/kWh of electricity generated.
Nuclear power received $0.00038/kWh of electricity generated. That is,
‘technosolar’ got 68 times more funds per unit generation than nuclear. Of
course this is only direct subsidy — it does not include tax credits,
subsidies by power companies that must maintain spinning reserve for times
when wind is weak, or subsidies by customers who regularly pay a few cents
per kWh for Green Power. Wind in the US has also received a production
credit (subtracted from taxes, not income) of 1.8 c/kWh.

In the UK, between 1990-2005, total government allocations to renewables R&D
(including research council projects but leaving out fuel cells & embedded
generation) was about £180m while nuclear fission & fusion got about £370m-
more than double.

My numbers quoted for the US were subsidies for different generation sources
per kWh. Using the 2004 UK electricity figures, non-hydro renewables
produced 13.6 TWh of electricity and nuclear produced 73.7 TWh. Taking these
as average figures over the 1990-2005 period of 16 years, that amounts to
£0.00083/kWh for renewables and £0.000314/kWh for nuclear — so on that
basis, renewables gets 2.6 times more funds than nuclear. This is actually a
little unfair on nuclear, as over the period it has produced a lot more
energy, on average, than non-hydro renewables, which were close to nothing
in 1990 (whereas nuclear was 58 TWh).

Further, the <http://aua.org.au/Content/Lenzenreport.aspx>
new ISA analysis
by Manfred Lenzen backs up the above — it puts subsidies for nuclear power
as lower than any other energy technology, based on the 2007-2009
literature.

Critique’s reply:
I guess that would be true if you only counted direct subsidies however you
must acknowledge the indirect subsidies over the 60 or so years that nuclear
power has been around as well as the technology transfer from military
applications.

It would be very difficult to exactly pin down the total amount of money
spent on nuclear however if you prefer the direct DOE figure then go ahead
and quote this one.

David Walter’s response:

Setting aside for a second the ‘indirect subsidies’ nuclear has received,
the main point is that wind and solar really wouldn’t even run, at all,
without these huge subsidies per kWhr they get. Period. They wouldn’t pay
for the maintenance and staffing on existing plant and material. This isn’t
true due to the massive revenue flow nuclear gets. Nuclear would keep on
going, *everywhere*, basically.

Now…the indirect subsidies. Yes, these are “historical” subsidies, 94%
(approx) received *prior* to 1974. In fact, it’s very hard to parse out.
Some were in fact *direct* and not “indirect”. But most it was as a result
of the Navy and Army nuclear program which the civilian side was a spin off.
The first civilian plant at Shippingport was a former Navy nuclear reactor
where they ran a variety fuels — including thorium — for R&D (all the while
pumping out MWs).

But how long does one ‘hold this ‘against’ nuclear? Really. The subsidy was
paid. Now, ever KW of power produced slowly reduces the % of that subsidy to
the overall ‘cost’ of a nuclear KW, doesn’t it? Should we NOT use nuclear
because it had massive subsidies, most of which was for military nuclear
propulsion programs?

Today, nuclear in my opinion is important enough TO subsidize. I’m all for
it. It’s a proven carbon mitigator. The subsidies have been more than worth
it. The US gov’t should set aside about 10 billion USD *specifically* to
deploy a variety of Generation IV reactors and get it over with.

From George Stanford:

All:

Our gov't is subsidizing "renewables" to the tune of $30 Billion (thanks to
Jan van Erp for flagging the story). See <
http://snipurl.com/osy18>.

Now let's do a little figgerin'. "This
administration has set a goal of doubling renewable electricity generation over
the next three years," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement."
That can't include hydro, so the "renewable" fraction would go up to 4.8% (see
figure below), adding to the grid 2.4% of its present capacity of 1,000,000 MWe,
or 24,000 MWe. But that's nameplate capacity, and actual capacity is perhaps
30% of that, so the additional real capacity is more like 7,200 MWe.

Thus the subsidy per kWe of real added capacity would be $30B / (7,200,000
kWe) = $4k / kWe, or $4B / GWe. That, dear friends, is roughly the total cost
of building a new nuclear plant, according to some estimates (not the lowest).

It would be legitimate to observe that the $30B includes something for
transmission lines. It also would be legitimate to point out that most of that
new transmission capacity would not be needed if the same new power came from
nuclear plants near regions of high population density, instead of from the
remote areas where the wind blows and the sun shines.

Important: This subsidy is not seed money to bring a new technology up to
economic competitiveness, which would be a proper use of public funds. It's
largely for construction, with known technology -- and it will only partially
cover the construction costs, at that.

Let's not hear any more comments about excessive subsidies for nuclear
power.

The Von Hippel arguments

From Robert Hargraves (posted to LA Times site):

Von Hippel's article is partly right but incomplete. Yes,
spent fuel can be safely stored in dry casks for decades; there is no reason
to panic. Yes, France's pioneering reprocessing is not good enough. It
separates the uranium and plutonium, leaving low volume radioactive waste to
store, but leaves France with excess uranium and plutonium. He is wrong
about the US "we don't reprocess, you don't need to either" success. Banning
US reprocessing didn't stop India, China, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa,
and North Korea from making nuclear weapons, and it has not impeded Iran.
France, UK, India, Japan, and Russia reprocess spent fuel. Spent nuclear
fuel still contains 97% of its original potential energy. Technologies such
as the integral fast reactor allow spent fuel to be "deep burned" to
generate electric power. The integral fast reactor can also consume the much
greater, fallow stocks of depleted uranium created by uranium enrichment
plants that manufacture today's US nuclear reactor fuel. Even more energy
can be harvested from more plentiful thorium using the liquid fluoride
thorium reactor. There is enough carbon-free nuclear power for millennia.

CANDU reactor

Built for under $2000 per kw in china. Can run on broad range of fuel, but
doesn't fully transmute all actinides.

CANDU has a good neutron economy because heavy water has lower parasitic
neutron capture than light water. That's why they can operate with natural
uranium. Which also means CANDU can be fueled with a lot of alternate fuels
-- reconstituted LWR spent fuel (so-called DUPIC cycle), reprocessed uranium
from LWR spent fuel (U-235 content is still higher than natural uranium),
and even plutonium or TRU containing fuel.

However, CANDU as well as any other thermal spectrum reactors cannot
transmute minor actinides effectively. They convert actinides to even higher
actinides than consuming them. Some are consumed but the net effect in long
term radiological toxicity is insignificant.

Actinides can be consumed effectively only in fast reactors.

Next Steps

A request by GE for a 810 determination that the IFR is not sensitive nuclear
technology seems to me to be the next step so discussions can be held with
Russia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea.

What are the easy steps that Dr.
Chu can authorize?

1) Start the NRC licensing process of PRISM (using the Fuel Cycle R&D funds).
This make progress transparent to all stakeholders.

3) With 1 started.... confidence come back to the system. With 2 done
you use the 1992 Energy Policy Act to start PRISM. This puts the
government action into doing appropriations, which seems to be a bit easier than
authorization language.

Miscellaneous factoids about the IFR

1. Even with LWR, the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is so high
that you could profitably ‘mine’ seawater for U at a decent energy return. So
with conventional (~10 MtU) + phosphates (~30 MtU) we have at least 40 MtU of
mineable U [probably substantially more] and another 4600 MtU in seawater. Let’s
imagine we ran 10,000 GWe of LWR to supply all worldwide energy needs (including
liquid fuel replacement). That’s a 27 fold increase compared to the output of
LWR today. Current 370 GWe needs 65,000 tU/yr (if we weren’t using weapons Pu
also). So 10,000 GWe of LWR would need 1.75 MtU. We have over 2,500 years of
fuel – before we go to Th. Sea water extraction has been estimated at
<$1,000/kg, which is expensive, but still about 100 times cheaper than coal, per
joule. Of course it would be ludicrous to continue to use LWR beyond the next 50
years or so, but the point is that U is not going to run out even with a major
expansion of LWR over the next few decades, as IFRs ramp up.

Bottom line: IFRs win hands down in the
sustainability, safety and waste management stakes, and pyroprocessing trounces
PUREX in regards to proliferation resistance. But LWRs are still a superb clean
energy generation technology and a massive rollout of these, side by side with
fast reactors, is (now, after understanding the issues) fine by me. We need all
the extra Pu for initial IFR loadings that we can get. There is no need to
dismiss LWR to win the IFR argument, in my humble opinion.

Before Al Gore
became VP, he wrote a book Earth in the balance: "Ecology and the Human Spirit."
On page 328, he wrote: “The research and development of alternative approaches
should focus on discovering, first, how to build a passively safe design (whose
safety does not depend upon the constant attention of bleary-eyed technicians)
that eliminates many risks of current reactors, and second, whether there is a
scientifically and politically acceptable means of disposing of – in fact,
isolating, nuclear waste.” So that's exactly what the IFR provides. So it meets
his criteria, but he won't endorse it and will not explain why he won't.

IFRs
can be used to replace the burners in a coal plant. You cannot do that with a
normal LWR reactor.

Even if you don't believe in global warming, you should
definitely believe in the Atmospheric Brown Cloud (ABC). It's coming our way.
Nuclear and the IFR is the best way to stop it.

A kilogram of uranium contains
about as much energy as two million kilograms of coal, and coal is already a
concentrated form of energy. So it's an incredibly concentrated form of energy
if you can harness it to its full advantage.

Comparison to the Areva MOX fuel
fabrication facility in Savannah River

MOX plant does in fact, make the resulting Pu unusable for weapons. It gets
the job done.

But let's put the cost in perspective.

Do you know how much we spent on the entire fast reactor program in the US
over > 30 years? I'm told it is about $5 B, which is the largest expenditure
DOE has ever made in any energy technology. And it was working as promised
before they pulled the plug!

Compare that with the >$4.8 billion we will spend on just reprocessing 34
tons of Pu. That plant is scheduled to open in 2016.

For $1B, we can process 100 tons per year with pyro. (if we hadn't cancelled
the IFR project).

In short, we are sucking funds from doing it the right way into doing it the
wrong way at well over 100 times the cost per ton vs. doing it with
pyroprocessing....and it is ONLY for weapons Pu!!!!!

This is why Ray Hunter (former #2 guy at DOE nuclear) thinks that building
the MOX plant is one of the dumbest decisions we have made in the nuclear
space.

It is a stunning contrast isn't it?... spend $5B to create the world's best
fast reactor...then cancel it.... then spend another $5B on the most
inefficient way to get rid of the 34 tons of Pu you can think of....and that
project is the one that is NOT cancelled!!!

Today, we are fully funding the dumb decision and not giving a dime to the
smart decision.

We shake our heads at the stupidity of this.

How can we be so dumb? People who voted on this in Congress either weren't
informed of the alternative way that was 100 times cheaper...or, more
likely, just didn't consider it due to the "Carter decision" not to
reprocess, .... our Presidents make awfully dumb decisions.... Iraq war,
Afghastan war, Clinton decision to stop the IFR, etc. Or they were just told
"we HAVE to do this to comply with the Russian agreement." Bullshit. The
Russians are doing it the way we should be doing it here: using it as fuel
in fast reactors.

This is because this nuclear stuff can't be simplified into a sound bite and
isn't easy to understand. You've spent more hours on this than anyone in
Congress, and you are still learning. I am still learning too, and I've
had more than a 1 year head start.

If the MOX funding cannot be touched, then you cannot justify for the
immediate weapons disposal need. Not sure what the operational cost of the
MOX plant is for 10 years...

It would be a shame to use 34 tons of fissle
material and recycle it in LWRs because fast reactors need large quantities
of fissile to start up and fissile material is in short supply.

Pyro vs. Purex and proliferation

Experts at UC Berkeley have concluded it is likely to be substantially easier
to apply safeguards to pyroreprocessing than to conventional aqueous
reprocessing.

If the US doesn't do pyro, the world defaults to aqueous. In other words,
the genie is out of the bottle and if we don't don't show people the safer
way, we will be in a world of the "less safer" way.

This makes the argument simple: it is simply the lesser of two evils.

But the better argument is "no, you can't just walk in and steal it from hot
cell... it's the room that's hot, the fact that the material is NOT is
simply not relevant" So the incremental "risk" created by fast reactors is
minimal since even if you stole the material it is VERY difficult to make a
bomb from it. On the other hand, using enrichment technology, it's easy to
get bomb material. If you have LWRs around, you need enrichment. That means
you can make a bomb without a reactor!!!! If you have fast reactors, you
don't need enrichment. Switching the world to fast reactors makes us safer
because it makes things harder for the terrorist. The material is very hard
to steal, and even if you steal it, it is VERY hard to make a bomb unless
you have Nobel prize quality talent working for you.

The problem is only experts can figure out which side is telling the whole
truth and let me assure you that Frank Von Hippel is not telling you the
full story and select the facts to fit his point of view. Frank said "fast
reactors are unreliable." I pointed out that EBR-II was VERY reliable. He
said "yes, it is the exception that proves the rule." Guys like Von Hippel
are REALLY dangerous because few people know the facts and can break through
the smokescreen.

A short IFR pitch

IFR story is a story of how the US government paid billions to our National
Laboratories to engineer a solution to the energy and climate crisis (before it
became a crisis), the solution worked, then President Clinton cancelled the
project telling the world in his State of the Union speech that this power was
"unnecessary."

Nuclear provides 70% of our clean energy in the US, even though we haven't
built a new reactor in 30 years!

Despite nuclear being the elephant in the room, the world "nuclear" appears
only TWICE in Waxman-Markey. That is absurd since we have 10 times as much
energy just in the Depleted Uranium waste (which is just sitting there) than we
have coal in the ground.

We are currently not doing anything to exploit our largest energy resource
(which is also one of our cleanest). This reactor is ready to be built, GE has a
design ready to built, and we are doing NOTHING.

The economic argument at the current time is not
winnable...the economics for construction costs and recycling vs. fresh fuel +
enrichment are mildly in our favor or mildly against us depending on who you
believe, but it isn't compelling either way.

It is the softer arguments where we win:

- public acceptance

- technology leadership

- environmentally responsible (waste product is only
dangerous for 300 years so easier to store safely than traditional nuclear waste
which is dangerous for 100,000 years)

- morally responsible not to get rid of nuclear fuel and
to use the resources we have efficiently and wisely

1) obama said he wants US to be a leader in clean
energy. Best way to become a leader is being the leader in 4th gen nuclear.
Counter argument will be "not economic, no one will buy them" to which you
say
"that's why we should start now to perfect and cost reduce the technology"

2) it uses waste from today's reactors for fuel so
is the #1 best way by far to deal with the nuclear
waste problem...public acceptance of expansion of nuclear will be much
easier if we can show we can deal with the waste

3) GIF Roadmap says we must deploy fast reactors
commercially by 2030. Which means we should be building demo plants now.
Counter argument from Ernie Moniz: GIF Roadmap is wrong. We have plenty of
uranium and we can just store waste in dry cask storage. In short, they
completely discount the benefit of showing we can dispose of the waste NOW.

4) we need to develop a baseload power technology
cheaper than coal. Nuclear is the best bet. But the current once-through
cycle is not sustainable...we run out of cheap uranium (just like we are
running out of oil now) and it is environmentally bad.... by focusing
funding on sustainable nuclear, we are investing in a LONG TERM smart
solution that is resource efficient and it uses the DU and other nuclear
waste that is piling up that is worth TRILLIONS of dollars IF we have fast
reactors and is worth NOTHING if we don't. In short, with a $3B investment,
you create a technology that can literally turn "lead" (in this case DU)
into "gold" (in this case, raw material for nuclear reactors) and turn an
asset worth $0 into one worth well over $1 trillion dollars. How can we
ignore that kind of return on investment?? Can anyone name any other
investment that has that kind of ROI?

5) IFR is sustainable nuclear and it is the best
technology to focus on to solve the global warming problem

6) less repository space needed. Without fast reactors, you'll need 22 Yucca
mountains by 2100. Today, we don't even have ONE repository!

IFRs are passively safe

IFRs reduce the need to do
enrichment (enrichment technology can be used to make bomb material)

Pu is never separated out and isn't isotopically pure (you'd never make a
bomb this way because there are much easier ways)

Generates zero long-lived nuclear waste. It creates just fission products) and that waste is only
dangerous for around 300 years (instead of over 100,000 years as with
conventional reactors)

Waste
separation (separating out the actinides)

so some
purification of the FPs at a reasonable price is still in the cards --- and
I would not call them waste, either. With our 40000 tons of used fuel, if
converted to FPs in a fast reactor, the FPs would be worth about $ 100
billion in 300 years when they can be separated into their constituents by
ordinary means, with rhodium, palladium and rubidium alone being about half
that. Fort Knox at the moment has about 150 million troy ounces of gold
worth currently about $ 200 billion. So our FPs would be half a Fort Knox.
Yours would be several Fort Knox's.

In
a given electrorefining run, you do not recover all (hence 1.5 nines), but
the remainder stays in the electrolyte salt to be recovered in the next run,
and so on. When you are ready to process the electrolyte salt for waste
streams, you do a drawdown operation to recover the remaining actinides.
Therefore, what’s not recovered in any given electrorefining run is not a
loss but work in progress. What’s not recovered in the drawdown gets to the
waste, and this is a real loss and should be kept minimum. If a single
drawdown does not recover all, you can do another drawdown and so on until
you get the required level of recovery (say 99.9%).

Why Metal fuel is better than oxide fuel

Electrorefining is much easier (metal is compatible with
pyroprocessing)

Higher breeding ratios

Easier fuel fabrication: I've said before, and will say
again; with oxide fuel, in a pyroprocess, you've got a huge problem with fuel
refabrication. Making those aspirin-sized pellets with ppm fission-product
carand with the minor actinides), grinding every one of them to precise
dimension, essentially can't be done. At least not at finite cost. Oxide fuel
fabrication with a contaminated product is a pure loser. Metal fuel, remotely
cast: slam dunk. We did it thousands of times at FCF.You simply pressurize the
casting furnace when the molds hit the melt, and blast 18" of metal fuel into
the molds. You don't have aspirin-sized tablets; you've got 18" metal fuel
elements. No grinding, no further dinking around.

Lower costs (e.g. pyro is lower cost and metal is
compatible with pyro)

Urgency argument

This is a good summary of the urgency. The point isn’t whether IFR is *THE*
best design. Most people think it is, but the point is that it is adequate for
the mission and we have lots of experience with it so that we know that.

Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time over “the single best design”

The argument should be whether the IFR is capable or not of meeting the 3 part
mission.

Ask your fellow members of Congress: “Is there another fast reactor design that
has MORE than 30 years of actual operating experience that we should choose
instead?”

To my way of thinking, there is one, and ONLY one reason
for urgency: to demonstrate that there is a feasible was of dealing with the
spent LWR fuel without relying on geologic disposal. We can dispute why
geologic disposal is not a good idea (wasteful of resources; unprovable safety;
NIMBY; whatever), but this is today, the biggest threat to the acceptability of
a massive expansion of LWR deployment, and therefore, our energy security.

The only feasible technology for this today is recycle in fast reactors.

We need to demonstrate that this technology is (or is not) practical and
economically feasible. That will require building and
operating facilities over several years:
(1): a plant to recover actinides from spend LWR fuel;
(2): a fast reactor to burn the recovered actinides;
(3) a facility to recycle the fast reactor fuel.

There are available technologies for part 1 (recovery).
We can haggle later as to what is the best technology, but doing this is no big
deal.

Part 2: For me the choice of what type of fast reactor should be on what is the
most advanced design, which is a PRISM type IFR. Again, there will be plenty of
time to haggle over whether this is the best design or not. At this point, it
is not important that we pick the BEST design.
Shippingport was clearly not a perfect design, but it proved its point.

The key is getting something to work for part 3, and to demonstrate that this is
practical.

Since such a demonstration, if successful, would be game-changing in energy
policy, I see this as a proper government investment.

If this is successful, I'm sure there will be plenty of interest in commercial
development when it makes economic sense. We do not need to decide now as to
when this technology should be rolled out in large scale. In the mean time, if
Moniz and other academics want to study various technologies, including
Travelling waves and other such nonsense, so be it.

But we need to get on with demonstrating whether there is a credible alternative
to geologic disposal or not.

Keep the message simple, so that even a politician can understand it.

Status of fast reactors in other countries

India is constructing a 500 MWe fast breeder reactor, called
Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR). They claim a startup in 2010 but I expect
it to be next year at the earliest. I have some old clippings of the
construction phase. But probably it’s best if contact the Chief Engineer of the
project directly for latest pictures. You can try to contact S. C. Chetal,
Director of Reactor Engineering Group at Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic
Research.

China is constructing China Experimental Fast Reactor (CEFR),
which in fact achieved the initial criticality in July. You can contact its
Chief Engineer, Prof. Xu Mi (Xu is the last name.

Russia is constructing BN-800, planned to be on-line by 2012 but
I expect some delays.

France has not started the construction yet. They are now in the
process of finalizing the specifications for ASTRID (advanced sodium
technological reactor for industrial demonstration). As far as I know, they have
not decided officially the size, etc. yet. They plan to complete the
specifications by 2012. In the meantime, they are evaluating various design and
technology options. Their official plan is to construct ASTRID by 2020.

Japan is also considering a prototype fast reactor by 2025 time
frame. They designated Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (actually formed a subsidiary
MHI-FBR) to be responsible for the development of the design.

South Korea is developing a 600 MWe fast reactor, called KALIMER,
but they are in a much early stage of planning compared to the above mentioned
countries.

Comparison with LFTR

The LFTR concept continues to be studied by chemists who
like to build complex chemical processing plants, except that this one must
operate at high temperature with chemically corrosive liquid fuel containing
hazardous fission products that must be cooled. It also produces U233, a
potential material for a nuclear explosive, that can be separated from the
thorium unless the fuel contains uranium which then leads to production of
plutonium. The fission products must be periodically removed from the fuel to
maintain the reactor critical thus there is a high level waste product in liquid
form that must be processed into a suitable waste form.

The ORNL MSR experiment was just that, an experiment.
Conceptual designs for these reactors have never shown sufficient economic
promise or security advantages to compete with LWRs and FRs. The high
temperature corrosion issue requires considerable materials development in order
to achieve a sufficient reliable and safe system. Clean up of the remains of the
MSR has proven to be a major cost that demonstrates additional unattractive
issues.

IFRG meeting 11/9/10 in Las Vegas notes

There were about 50 people at the meeting in Las Vegas.

Proliferation is often used by critics to end discussion on the IFR. Not one
person thought that the IFR increases the proliferation risk. A very important
thing for us to do is to do a better job to get that message out. The people who
are making these decisions are misinformed with the biggest problem being people
referring to recycling as a proliferation problem and not distinguishing PUREX
vs. pyro. Pyro is safe. Furthermore, the reprocessed fuel is protected in a hot
cell. You'd die trying to get it. The critics never point that out.

Since the world is short of fissile to start up lots of IFRs, you'd never
want to operate in burn mode for the foreseeable future (no matter how
politically incorrect that might be).

There are lots of reasons the IFR is a good thing. When Garamendi goes to
sell this in Congress, he will use whatever reason appeals most to the people
he's selling to. So it doesn't make sense to focus on just the "it solves the
waste problem" advantage, but use other reasons as well (improved safety,
improved efficiency, leader in advanced technology, fsat and cheaper way to
dispose of unwanted Pu from weapons, solves the problem for South Korea
reprocessing in a safer way than burying the waste or PUREX, we need to invest
now in a scalable solution for when peak oil makes oil scarce (coming in one or
two decades), etc.

IFRs are safer than even Gen III reactors. It took 20 years before they
figured out to make IFRs passively safe.

If you want to make Plutonium for weapons, you wouldn't use an IFR or LWR for
that. There are specialized reactors types that you'd use. So it's not like
having this technology makes it easier for a nation-state to produce weapons
grade Pu.

If fissile material availability isn't a limit to growing the number of
reactors you need, you'd always want to build IFRs. But if you are limited today
by the amount of fissile, then you can build a lot of LWRs now, and use the
waste from those as startup charges for fast reactors. So the reason LWRs are
good is because the low fissile requirement means you can expand them faster in
the short run. The sooner you switch to IFRs, the more you can grow things long
term. So it is an interesting tradeoff.

Peak oil is coming sooner than people think. All that energy will have to
come from somewhere. This is why nuclear and IFRs are much more important than
people think right now.

Yoon thinks we can delay building a reactor for several years; the most
important thing is building a demo pyro facility, first for used LWR used fuel,
later for fast reactor used fuel. Other people thought we should have a higher
sense of urgency.

Yucca Mountain is a good thing. But DOE actually paid money to an
organization who did a public campaign to convince people in Nevada that it was
a bad thing! Harry Reid has run his campaign on closing Yucca Mountain. So Obama
told Chu to close it and Chu is following orders. That is why Chu never gives a
scientific reason for his decision; it is pure political. And the BRC isn't even
allowed to discuss Yucca Mountain!

It doesn't matter that much where we build it: there are several acceptable
sites. This may end up being a political decision.

Key thing is to model the IFR bill on public-private partnership that was
done before. NRC and DOE as a consultant This works. Do it without requiring NRC
approval since that would really slow things down.

Having a list of Republicans and Senators in House and Senate who like
nuclear power is critically important. On the Senate side, Alexander is probably
the right one to lead this since he is a powerful Republican, pro-nuclear, and
clearly understands that renewables are not sufficient. In addition, he's told
me that he can get every Republicans to line up behind him on the issue of
building more nuclear plants.

Other members of Congress include Corker, Vitter (maybe), Carper, Landrieu.
There was a nuclear caucus in the Senate that Landrieu was on.

There are two former NE1s who support the IFR (Bill Magwood and A. David
Rossin) and
one former NE2 (Ray Hunter).

A. David Rossin learned that if you do your job as NE1 and say what is right instead of covering for your
boss, you can be fired after 1 year in the job.

Nobody knows why Pete Miller resigned. Some rumors say it was agreed to at
the start. I got the impression he got fed up. He's not going to be doing
nuclear in the future, but is on to other things. Some people speculated he may
have cancer, but nobody knows.

Chu's background is in energy conservation and efficiency. So it's not
surprising he isn't pushing the IFR. Could be a lot of resistance in the White
House due to the erroneous perception about proliferation.

There were 4 action items and each was assigned to a person. Mike has the
list. Basically, proliferation paper, list of sympathetic members of Congress,
and strawman bill.

If there is one person who is in a position to really make it happen in
Congress, it is John Garamendi. Everyone was impressed with his knowledge and
expertise and understanding of the technical issues, as well as how Congress
works. He flew in especially for this meeting and actively participated
throughout. We need more people like him in Congress!

Waxman and Markey are pretty clueless about nuclear. In fact, Garamendi
himself knows more about nuclear than even their staffs! So if you think the
reason we are not making progress is because Congress has thought through the
issue and concluded it is not a good idea, think again! There inaction is due to
a lack of knowledge. It is up to us to keep trying to educate members of
Congress. So if we can get one of these A-list people interested, we can
probably open up a lot of doors and get attention.

There are a certain set of wealthy people who get more attention and access
in the White House than members of Congress. For example, I noted that Ray
Rothrock has met with Biden on nuclear, but John Garamendi has not.

IFR history notes

From 1965 to 1984 the focus of the AEC/ERDA/DOE Liquid Metal Fast Breeder
Reactor Program (LMFBR) was on mixed oxide fuel and a loop type reactor. It
was assumed that the aqueous process PUREX would be used for recycle and
minimal attention was devoted to this area. EBR-II operated over this
timeframe using metal fuel, but the reactor test positions were dedicated to
developing mixed oxide fuel for FFTF and CRBRP. Fortunately, some metal fuel
development was also taking place to improve the efficiency of EBR-II
operations, With the termination of the CRBRP in 1983, the future of the
LMFBR was in doubt. ANL proposed an IFR concept involving a metal fueled
pool type reactor with pyroprocessing to address cost, improved safety and
proliferation concerns all of which were given as reasons to terminate CRBRP.
Following the landmark safety tests in EBR-II in 1986, DOE redirected the
program to focus the technology on the IFR concept and a conceptual design
designated as PRISM. The FFTF which performed extremely well for 10 years
was now without a mission with the demise of CRBRP. After extensive studies
about the future use of FFTF, Secretary Richardson order the shutdown this
facility. However, I was able to get nine PRISM sized metal fuel assemblies
into FFTF before termination and the irradiation results are very good..
Significant progress was also made at ANL on improvements to metal fuel and
pyroprocessing before the IFR program was terminated. What did we learn from
the $12 billion LMFBR experience? Mixed oxide fuel combined with the
required aqueous reprocessing was technically and politically unacceptable.
Domestic interest in the IFR after termination was nonexistent until the the
Yucca Mountain project headed south. The needed deployment of a significant
number of LWRs is being impeded by the uncertainty of the spent fuel issue.
If the government who by law has the responsibility to accept and deal with
spent LWR fuel can't demonstrate an economical, safe and environmentally
sound solution to the problem, than the future of nuclear power in the U.S.
will be the subject of lawsuits for decades. AN IFR DEMONSTRATION WITH METAL
FUEL AND PYROPROCESSING IS THE ONLY VIABLE TECHNOLOGY PATH FOR RESOLVING THE
SPENT FUEL ISSUE. It is important to understand that the PRISM is a design
paid for by DOE and it is DOE who must take the leadership responsibility
for the demonstration step. The 100T/yr facility for converting LWR spent
fuel into PRISM feedstock is an essential first step. The IFR demonstration
would logically follow. It is not likely with the current DOE leadership and
the ongoing blue ribbon panel review that anything meanful will happen at
DOE for the next two years.Therefore some other initiative is needed to get
the ball rolling and Yoon Chang and Tom Blees are working on such an
initiative. At this point, our strategy should be to lobby Congress as Steve
Kirsch has done extremely well and to embarrass DOE to do the right thing. We
need to also set aside all the diversions that don't support the 100T/yr
demo facility and the IFR demonstration.

Ernie Moniz and the MIT Report on Nuclear

The problem with this report is they ignore political realities. The
anti-nuclear activists like Erich Pica object to nuclear because uranium mining
is dirty, enrichment is dirty, there is no solution to the waste problem,
reactors are not safe, etc. The IFR answers all these objections. But without it
being built, those objections remain. History shows that anti-nuclear activists
have been successful in delaying or closing nuclear plants. So you simply cannot
ignore political realities and make decisions based on technology arguments
alone. There must be an expansion of nuclear power in the US and the development
of the IFR is a tiny price to pay to substantially increase the public
acceptance of such a strategy (assuming we also educate the public on the facts,
rather than allow the hype to perpetuate).

Secondly, MIT assumes that everyone will do what they say and not build fast
reactors until they are technically needed. But that is not true. Russia, China,
France, and Japan are building fast reactors now. So if we wait for 50 years
like Moniz suggests, we will enter the market 50 years too late. We know that
nuclear is the most important clean power technology. Why would we want to give
other countries a 50 year head start on developing the latest nuclear nuclear
technology? Is that our success strategy for becoming a world leader in nuclear
power to focus completely on the very oldest nuclear technology? It would be
like Intel trying to compete by focusing on vacuum tube computers because
transistors are too expensive to make.

Thirdly, if we do not commercialize the pyroprocessing technology, then the
French aqueous reprocessing will win by default, just like it did for
reprocessing our weapons waste. This is environmentally dirty, very expensive,
and takes a lot of time. Our pyroprocessing technology is vastly superior in
cost, time, environmental, and proliferation impact. If we are concerned about
nuclear proliferation, if we do not provide the world with a cheaper alternative
to aqueous reprocessing, then the world will have to a much more dangerous
solution. We shouldn't want that at all.

Technically speaking, we don't really need electric cars yet either. Yet
everyone is racing to be the first to market with electric cars at the lowest
prices. The same would be true today if the NRC didn't make it so expensive to
get approval. If the FDA and FAA were run like the NRC, we would have no drugs
and no airplanes. The NRC is basically safety, regardless of time and expense.
We don't regulate any other energy technology that way. For example, in 15
minutes, cars kill more people than nuclear reactors have killed over 50 years.
So it is OK to have deaths from drugs, cars, and planes, but a single death from
nuclear power must never be tolerated! What kind of sense does that make?!?

Barry Brook wrote:

Steve, all points are
excellent, but the third, about PUREX otherwise winning by default, may well
resonate most with reps. Pyroprocessing is central to all this (waste recycle,
proliferation resistance, economics), and can no longer afford to be
misrepresented and equated with PUREX etc.

Nuclear vs. other energy sources

Funny how when people die from other energy sources, it's perfectly OK. If
one person might have died from nuclear power in it's 50 year history, we shut
down the industry.

BP accident offshore oil drilling rig explodes... 11 people killed instantly.
It spewed nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico damaging
property, wildlife, jobs, tourism. We put a moratorium on building offshore rigs
in place for a few months.

Natural gas pipeline explodes in San Bruno, CA, near my home town and kills 8
people instantly and injuring dozens of others. We ask if there are any other
leaks.

Kingston coal plant breached and a massive amount of ashen sludge poured into
nearby residential areas as well as the Emory River, a tributary of the
Tennessee River, which is the source of drinking water for millions of people.
The sheer size of this environmental disaster actually makes the Exxon Valdez
oil spill look like small change. Over
$1B in
clean up costs. No problem at all!!!

Exxon Valdez oil spill: $3.8B in cleanup costs.

TMI accident happens. One person might have been killed (statistically
speaking...unlike for the BP accident, there were no actual deaths that can be
attributed to the accident). Our reaction: shut down the entire nuclear power
industry. Note that the cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactor system
at TMI-2 took nearly 12 years and cost approximately US$973 million which is
less than the cost of the Kingston coal plant disaster and far less than the BP
accident or Exxon Valdez. Under $1B is the total cleanup cost for accidents in
the ENTIRE history of commercial nuclear power in the US. And we've learned a
lot since those early experiences.

So because nuclear MIGHT have caused 1 death over 50 years, and the cleanup
cost $1B, we shut down the nuclear industry.

Is this rational?

Irrational fear of radiation

Anti-nuclear people often claim there is no safe level of radiation. Yet a
coal plant emits 100 times more radioactivity than a nuclear plant. But the
activists aren't trying to shut down coal plants. Similarly, when you fly on an
airplane, you are exposed to an unsafe level of radiation; far more
radiation than spending time in Chernobyl. Do we ban flights? Nope. Do any
activists tell the airlines to stop flying because they are exposing people to
unsafe levels of radiation? Nope, no protests at all. Ever!

Small leak from a nuclear plant where the leaked material is still at a safe
level of radiation: massive protests!

The head (or former head) of the radiation protection
division of U.S.-NRC once stated (jokingly) at an IAEA reception in Vienna:

There are three types of photons, namely 'green'
ones, 'yellow' ones and 'red' ones.

The 'green' ones are plentiful and of natural
origin. We are not concerned about them and we don't regulate them.

The 'yellow' ones come from medical applications.
They are usually less plentiful, but we are a bit concerned about them and
thus we regulate them somewhat.

The 'red' ones are very rare, they find their origin
in nuclear energy applications. We are very concerned about them and
consequently we regulate the hell out of them.

MIT Nuclear report

The MIT Nuclear 2010 report assumes that nuclear will grow only slightly in
its role as an electricity source and not at all in any other role. In that "low
growth" scenario (which is their high growth scenario), there is indeed an
abundance of fissile material. The root of our difference in interpretation is
the relative importance you put on rapidly scaling up a nuclear energy source.
The MIT folks barely make a nod towards climate change and then mention using
nuclear processes heat to facilitate fossil carbon extraction. They see a
different set of problems than we do:

Their problems: the people of the world don't want nuclear, they worry about
"proliferation", it is all about economics.

Our problems: we care about ocean acidity, sea level rise, climate change and
a sustainably increasing standard of living for a growing population. And we are
willing to use taxes and government spending to get there. We are willing to
shift the incentives from subsidizing fossil fuels to subsidizing carbon free
alternatives (the government would spend the same amount of money, except it
would just be spend on things that make the problem better instead of those
activities which make the problem worse).

Another view:

MIT is a firmly established defender of the "establishment"
economy that will be completely disrupted when the threads restricting the
deployment of many different types of fission energy production systems get
thrown off.

Many of the people at the top of the economic heap in our
current hydrocarbon based industrial economy have built their careers and their
capital asset base on the idea that energy fuels are relatively scarce, found in
only limited geographic areas, require vast transportation infrastructures, and
now require a vast investment in additional handling equipment in order to clean
up their obvious effect on our environment. Many of the establishment promotes
the notion that the only alternative to hydrocarbons are weak, unreliable
weather based sources that also require a vast capital investment and will never
work as well to provide the kind of power that people like to use.

There are a few people who know a completely different way
to look at energy. We recognize it as being abundant, widely distributed around
the world, and available from incredibly dense fuel sources. We know that the
waste products from using it are quite concentrated and can be isolated from the
environment until such time as we recycle them to produce even more energy.

The gift of abundant, clean, inexhaustible energy is a
welcome boon to most of us, but to those who explore, extract, finance, protect,
transport, process, and clean up fossil fuels it represents an almost
existential competitive threat. That collection of people has an incredible bank
- ExxonMobil, with just 2-3% of the global fossil fuel market share, collected
$440 billion in revenue in 2009. Their taxable profit was more than $40 billion,
but because of the extraordinarily generous depreciation and depletion
allowances provided to the petroleum extraction industry, their free cash flow
was far higher.

Even a small portion of that revenue buys a whole lot of
advertising and media friends. Another portion rents a lot of friendly congress
critters and administration advisors. An even smaller portion of that revenue
aimed at the right teams of university researchers can produce all kinds of
favorable reports - or reports that slant against the competition by "damning
with faint praise."

Fortunately, we now live in an era where it does not take a
vast amount of capital to tell the real story and get people to listen.

Information on the IFR

These are the top links I give to people who want to learn more about the IFR.

Retirement of Dr. Charles Till: this says it all in one page.
"Unfortunately, this program was canceled just 2 short years before the
proof of concept. I assure my colleagues someday our Nation will regret
and reverse this shortsighted decision."

The arguments for doing an IFR now: A word document I wrote
summarizing the benefits for doing an IFR now (they are all soft
benefits since on a pure economic basis, the IFR is a wash unless we
start investing now to get the costs down...but it is way better than
solar or wind cost wise if your regulatory system is fixed)

"Nuclear power plants - now safer and cheaper (15 minute audio)I highly recommend this.
Barry Brook traces the history of nuclear power. Today, about 440
nuclear power reactors are in use, known as Generation 2 reactors. These
were designed between 1960 and 1980. Recently, Generation 3 reactors
have adopted a standard design, allowing for faster approval. 45 are
being built. 350 are planned. Chernobyl was a cheap design. There was no
containment building.
Barry Brook describes Chernobyl as an accident waiting to happen. Newer
reactors are orders of magnitude safer than the older models. Generation
4 is the new excitement. Efficiency is much higher meaning uranium
supplies will last so much longer. They can burn a range of isotopes of
uranium and other elements producing short-lived waste."

There has been discussion of the need to fund test projects for a number
of new technologies -- including fast reactors -- and we will not get in the
way of such funding, as long as the projects are effectively designed to
test new technology ideas. My folks have looked at fast reactors and their
view is "this may be the best option, but we can't really tell because the
technical issues remain to be sorted out, and costs matter." But while we
are therefore not going to bet on this -- or any other technology -- as the
most promising for investment, we are in general in favor of testing new
technologies, including this one.

Knowledgeable people on IFR technology

Yoon Chang: Yoon is considered to be the world's leading expert on
IFR technology. He worked with Charles Till for years on the project at
Argonne Labs, and took over as director when Charles retired. Tom Blees: Author of Prescription for the Planet. He is a writer with absolutely no ties
to the nuclear industry or any other interest, financial or otherwise,
in the technologies presented in his plan for a global energy
revolution. He simply wants to solve the world's most intractable
problems

Eric Loewen: Eric is the
lead nuclear engineer for General Electric's Generation IV reactor
project. GE has already proposed to the Global Nuclear Energy
Partnership (GNEP) that they be chosen to build the prototype plant, and
they've developed the design (based largely on the IFR research at
Argonne) to take nuclear power to this new level.

George Stanford: One of the IFR project nuclear physicists.
George has not only a deep understanding of the
technology but a knack for communicating that knowledge.

Jasmina Vujic: She's the chairperson of the Dept. of Nuclear
Engineering at U.C. Berkeley, well-versed in the state of reactor design
and current areas of research into commercial nuclear power.